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‘CHRISTIANITY AND 
MODERN THOUGHT 


<a OF PT 
OCT 2 1924 


BY 
CHARLES R. BROWN 
CHARLES A. DINSMORE 
RICHARD S. LULL 
EDWARD G. SPAULDING 






ALBERT P. FITCH 
BENJAMIN W. BACON 
WILLARD L. SPERRY 
CHARLES W. GILKEY 

ROBERT E. SPEER 


EDITED WITH A FOREWORD BY 
RALPH H. GABRIEL 


NEW HAVEN : YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 


LONDON - HUMPHREY MILFORD + OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 


MCMXXIV 


COPYRIGHT 1924 BY YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 


A FOREWORD 


‘THEOLOGY on the front pages of the metropolitan 
press in 1923 and 1924 was both a novel and an unex- 
pected American phenomenon. The United States has 
before been the scene of controversies within its 
churches, but it is doubtful if even the ecclesiastical 
dispute over slavery which broke in two some of the 
larger denominations drew the attention of the people 
as has the Fundamentalist Movement of the twentieth 
century. The popular reaction toward this struggle 
has badly shaken the theory of American indifference 
toward things of religion. Christianity, battered by 
recent world events, is displaying what to some is an 
unexpected vitality. 

There are many folk who think that Christianity has 
outlived its usefulness. They feel that the great achieve- 
ments of modern learning have antiquated the doc- 
trines of the humble teacher of ancient Palestine and 
that frank agnosticism is the only sound foundation 
for an individual’s philosophy of life. Their conviction 
is strengthened when they review the many instances 
in the past when the Church has openly opposed the 
advance of knowledge. There is also a group who hold 
that, in 1914, Christianity met its supreme test and 
failed. In that fateful year, with appalling suddenness, 
the forces of destruction which civilization had both 
begotten and chained were loosed, and the culture of 
Hurope faced a danger greater than any since the bar- 
barian invasions. The crisis found the Christian world 
sadly unprepared, split into different camps, the Greek, 
the Roman, and the Protestant churches. The last, in 


& 
v1 FOREWORD 


turn, was divided into a multitude of often picayune 
sects. The issue of the world conflict showed how far 
Christianity is from realizing its great ideal of univer- 
sal brotherhood. Christian fought with Christian; and 
one group sought to bring the whole Mohammedan 
world to its aid. | 

It is true that, in the days when death was taking a 
terrible toll, the fundamental mysteries of life were 
brought home to people with unprecedented force. For 
a time the war caused men to think much on the prob- 
lems of human duty and destiny. The spirit of a mag- | 
nificent idealism was abroad, and there was a serious 
tone in human affairs. As the age-old mystery of death 
touched lives all over the western world, people flocked 
to the churches for explanation and comfort. Religious 
leaders leaped to the hasty conclusion that the fires of 
war were refining the dross from human nature and 
that Christianity was about to enter its day of great- 
ness. They forgot that the war had also loosed passions 
which society only with the greatest of difficulty had 
brought under control. Such a loss outweighed any 
gain. When open war was succeeded by a hollow peace, 
the tragedy of the dominant religion of the West came 
clearly into view. 

America had been unified by the World War as never 
before in her history. While the glory of the great 
illusion still shone in the land, her Protestant leaders 
thought the time propitious for the gathering of her 
religious forces into a common enterprise that would 
make of American Christianity a beacon lighting the 
whole world. The Inter-Church World Movement was 
a splendid conception. Behind it lay all the knowledge 
about organization and propaganda that the war had 


FOREWORD vii 


brought into being. Within the hearts of its leaders 
burned the fires of a great purpose. The day of petty 
sectarianism seemed at an end. As the armies of the 
Allies had been united to crush the monster, militarism, 
so the armies of Protestantism should be united to 
make war on the powers of darkness. Yet the Inter- 
Church World Movement collapsed with a dismaying 
suddenness, probably the most spectacular failure of 
Christianity in the new world. In less than a decade 
after its fall American Protestantism faces its most 
threatening schism. The new fight centers about the 
Bible. 

The Church of the twentieth century confronts a 
new set of conditions. Highteenth and nineteenth cen- 
tury scholarship has borne fruit and the mass of knowl- 
edge which it has accumulated is a most important part 
of the foundation of modern civilization. The super- 
structure of our culture has been rebuilt in adjustment 
to the new learning. The Church has been no exception; 
like every other human institution it has been com- 
pelled to adapt itself to the intellectual development of 
the last two centuries. Its first reactions of hostility 
resulted in defeat. Then Protestantism demonstrated 
its inherent strength. In a quiet way the results of the 
new scholarship were brought into religious thinking 
and became a part of its structure. More and more the 
method and the point of view of the new investigator 
began to shape the work of the leaders in religious 
thought. There is no such thing as sectarianism in the 
scholar’s search for truth. Differences of opinion ap- 
pear, but they do not affect the fundamental principle 
that every statement or hypothesis must be tested by 
the facts and must run the gauntlet of the severest 


yi 
Vill FOREWORD 


criticism. Such an attitude is the antithesis of the de- 
nominationalism which teaches that the kingdom of 
heaven can only be achieved by a certain formula and 
that other opinions are unfortunate error. The Church 
itself applied the critical method to the investigation 
of that body of writings grouped together in the Bible 
and undertook the difficult and still unfinished task of 
separating the chaff from the wheat. Criticism quickly 
made it clear that the old doctrine of literal Biblical 
interpretation would have to be modified. 

Many people, therefore, have been surprised at the 
sudden reappearance in the Fundamentalist Movement 
of this outgrown dogma. They forget a number of 
things about the Protestant churches which help in 
explaining the phenomenon. Protestantism, both in 
theory and in practice, is essentially democratic. Both 
its greatest strength and weakness come from this 
characteristic. Protestantism insists that every man, 
alone and without the mediation of a priest, shall face 
the mysteries of life—shall be the captain of his own 
soul. Such a position breeds in some a rugged faith and 
in others spiritual cowardice. There are many who 
shrink from the responsibility. To such folk the author- 
ity of supernatural revelation is indispensable. 

Because church members govern the local organiza- 
tions, Protestant church leaders cannot in their preach- 
ing be very far in advance of the thinking of their 
parishioners. This makes for slow progress. Further- 
more, parishioners, like voters, are susceptible to dema- 
gogic appeals and, when conditions are right, can be 
herded into great crusades. The Fundamentalist Move- 
ment is a crusade to save the Bible. Back of it is the 
havoc of the war—not only bringing mourning into the 


FOREWORD 1x 


homes of the people but making them ask how a good 
God could permit such a thing to come to pass. The 
question is not easy to answer and, very frequently, 
individual faith has been wrecked by storms of doubt. 
At such a time of crisis, it is inevitable that many peo- 
ple should seek the protection of authority. It is the 
easiest and most comforting way; and, it should be 
borne in mind, it is practically the only way for those 
less fortunate folk who have neither the training nor 
the capacity to wrestle with the intellectual problems 
of their generation. Protestants have no authority to 
which to turn except the Bible; so the old doctrine of 
literal interpretation has again raised its head. 

But also behind the Fundamentalist Movement is the 
conservative traditionalism which has been the tend- 
ency of organized religion in all ages. Beliefs and 
rituals that have come down from the distant past 
acquire a sanctity that gives them a powerful grip on 
human life. They become the basis for elaborate ecclesi- 
astical doctrines. If one of these foundation stones be 
struck from its place, there are many who believe the 
whole structure of faith must tumble in. So long as 
modern learning was largely confined to the colleges 
and universities and their small number of graduates, 
its repudiation of many of the doctrines of antiquity 
was little noticed by the public. But when, after the war, 
the youth of the nation began flooding the institutions 
of higher learning and the popularization of knowledge 
through outlines of science, history, literature, and art 
became almost a fad, the religious conceptions of a host 
of work-a-day Americans came suddenly into collision 
with the new learning. To many such people the Dar- 
winian hypothesis seemed to drag men down to the 


x FOREWORD 


level of the brute and criticism of the Bible to profane 
the Lord’s handiwork. The old beliefs they knew and 
loved, but the new ideas seemed to destroy the very 
foundations of religion and to leave the individual for- 
saken in a Godless world. It was the instinct of self- 
preservation which raised from ocean to ocean a cry 
of fear from honest men and women who believed that 
all they held true and sacred was in jeopardy. Then a 
group of crusaders, both lay and ecclesiastical, dedi- 
cated their lives to the defence of Holy Writ. 

Over against the halting and often perplexed modern _ 
seeker after truth they have put the Book of the Ages. 
With a splendid sincerity they have called to the minds 
of their countrymen the danger to their homes and 
institutions which must grow out of the decay of the 
old religion. Over the length and breadth of the land 
men and women have listened to the message and have 
taken heart. Such is the background of the development 
that threatens American Protestantism with schism. 
But, although the Fundamentalist controversy may 
leave behind it the scars of a rupture, its ultimate effect 
will probably be to benefit greatly the Protestant 
Church. 

Conflict strengthens the ideas and positions of the 
opposing sides. The present struggle is not only demon- 
strating how far Protestantism has gone in its adapta- 
tions to modern knowledge, but is increasing and per- 
fecting those adjustments. Liberal Protestant leaders 
find themselves under the necessity of defending the 
results of those very scholars whom, a little more than 
a half century ago, almost the whole Church was attack- 
ing. Moreover, they are doing it with enthusiasm and 
deep conviction. The rapprochement seems destined to 


FOREWORD x1 


have far-reaching, almost revolutionary consequences. 
This acceptance by the Protestant Church of both the 
knowledge and the method of scholarship has put it in 
harmony with the greatest modern factor that is mak- 
ing for progress. All too frequently in the past organ- 
ized religion has served only to conserve the traditions 
of antiquity and to retard advance. It seems fairly clear 
that liberal Protestantism is shaking off this inherent 
tendency and is putting itself in the way to assume a 
new leadership in a new world. It is the problem of 
religion to deal with the adjustments of human life to 
the infinite mysteries. But religion must shape the 
tenets of its faith to accord with what is known and 
must subject them to. the fiery ordeal of criticism. This 
the Church is already beginning to do; and the result 
seems destined to be Protestant unity. 

Such unity will not be of organization. Experience 
has demonstrated that that is both impossible and un- 
desirable. Democracy, which is at the foundation of 
Protestantism, gives its best results when it carries 
with it considerable local autonomy. It is desirable that 
a congregation should have a large share in the direc- 
tion of its own affairs; it is also desirable that local 
churches should be united into national organizations 
which develop greater stability and amass larger re- 
sources. But to attempt to weld these national organi- 
zations into one super-church would be folly. Variation 
in form of worship and organization is both inevitable 
and advantageous; as well attempt to standardize men 
and women as to standardize Protestantism. But, if 
the leaders of the denominations have the scholar’s 
open-minded attitude toward the search for truth, intel- 
lectual unity will supplement and complete that of the 
Christian spirit. The Fundamentalist Movement, which 


xii FOREWORD 


is greatly strengthening the bond between the religious 
and the non-religious thinker, is steadily pushing the 
Church in this direction. In one or two years it has ac- 
complished what might otherwise have taken a decade. 

For this reason the present controversy seems likely 
to be of the greatest significance in the development of 
Protestantism. Christianity was, in its inception, a lay 
development in which the leaders of the regular reli- 
gious establishment played a negative and retarding 
part. A new enquiry was undertaken into the nature of 
human life and the problem of human destiny. The 
present trend in Protestantism seems to be a return to 
the spirit of those courageous and liberal-minded men 
who dared to break with Judaism, and who, after their 
own manner, sought truth wherever it might be found. 
If the passing of the Fundamentalists leaves thinkers 
within and without the Church engaged sympatheti- 
cally in a common task, Christianity will have passed 
one of its greatest milestones. It will be well on the way 
to becoming a new faith out of which will have been 
refined those encumbering superstitions and doctrinal 
antagonisms which are the heritage of ignorance. 

The purpose of the following chapters, which are the 
outgrowth of a course of lectures, organized by the 
Reverend Roy M. Houghton and given in the winter 
and spring of 1923 in New Haven, Connecticut, under 
the auspices of the Church of the Redeemer (Congrega- 
tional), is to present the points of view of a group of 
representative men, both lay and ecclesiastical, con- 
cerning various problems which scholarship, within and 
without the Church, has brought into being. 

Ratpxu H. GapriE., 
Assistant Professor of History, 
Yale University. 


CONTENTS 


Chapter I. Page 3 
Keeping the Faith Charles R. Brown 


Chapter II. Page 21 


Religious Certainty in an Age of Science 
Charles A. Dinsmore 


Chapter III. Page 39 
Evolution and Religion Richard 8S. Lull 


Chapter IV. Page 59 
The Psychology of Religion Edward G. Spaulding 


Chapter V. Page 81 


The Fundamental Beliefs of Christianity 
) Albert P. Fitch 


Chapter VI. Page 97 
The Return to Theology Benjamin W. Bacon 


Chapter VII. Page 127 
Life after Death Willard L. Sperry 


Chapter VIII. Page 145 


The Function of the Church in Modern Society 
Charles W. Gilkey 


Chapter IX. Page 179 


Christianity and International Relations 
Robert E. Speer 


KEEPING THE FAITH 


CHARLES R. BROWN 
Dean of Yale Divinity School. 


CHAPTER I 
KEEPING THE FAITH 
CHARLES R. BROWN 


‘THERE was an old man once who was not just setting 
sail—he was coming into port for the last time, as the 
event proved, so far as earthly voyages went. He was 
busily engaged in writing a letter to a young man. The 
older man had visited all the countries which the young 
man had seen and many more besides. He had felt the 
throb of life, the urge of hot desire, the bite and sting 
of temptation as the young man was feeling it at that 
hour—then he had added further installments of valu- 
able experience. He had gone through the year without 
missing a single month, spring, summer, autumn, and 
winter. Here away late in December he was summing 
up his whole philosophy of life for the benefit of one 
less experienced. 

This is the substance of what he wrote: ‘‘Endure 
hardness as a good soldier of Jesus Christ.’’ Submit to 
those disciplines which mean added efficiency. Not by 
dodging difficulties but by mastering them, do men 
attain. 

‘*Watch in all things and make full proof of thy serv- 
ice.’? Keep your eyes open and your mind on your job 
if you would make your life an asset rather than a lia- 
bility when society strikes a trial balance. ‘‘Stir up the 
gift of God which is in you’’—discover and utilize that 
unrealized capacity you have for something higher and 
finer than these surface activities which oftentimes are 
no better than empty gestures. 


4 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


‘For I am now ready to be offered. The time of my 
departure is at hand. I have finished my course; I have 
fought a good fight and I have kept the faith.”’ 

Now what did he mean by keeping the faith? What 
does it mean for anyone to keep the faith? What hap- 
pens when a man loses his faith? We sometimes hear 
devout fathers and mothers expressing reluctance 
about sending their sons to certain colleges for fear 
they may lose their faith. In these days of religious 
uncertainty, when the Fundamentalists on the one hand 
are impressing upon the minds of men a somewhat 
rigid, mechanical interpretation of the great spiritual 
verities and when some of the more liberal, open- 
minded men on the other side seem to be losing their 
grasp on the more vital factors in religious life, with a 
consequent loss of fervor and zest, it may be well to 
ask definitely how much is implied in keeping the faith. 

Let me say four things about that process of keeping 
or of losing one’s faith. First of all, keeping the faith 
does not mean thinking about things in general exactly 
as men thought about them in the fifteenth century or 
in the first. There was a time when all men believed that 
the earth was flat and that the blue sky arched above it 
like the lid of a butter dish. We know now that the 
earth is round and that it moves in its orbit through 
the infinite spaces of heaven and that all those stars 
and suns are worlds, many of them vastly greater than 
this earth of ours. 

There was a time when if a man’s children were sick 
or if his cow gave bloody milk, he decided that in all 
probability they had been ‘‘bewitched’’ by some un- 
friendly neighbor who possessed that devilish power. 
Hight words in the Bible caused the death of more than 


KEEPING THE FAITH 5 


thirty thousand people. The eight words were these: 
‘*Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’’? The serious- 
minded men of that day took the statement literally, 
and they proceeded to put it into execution by harrying 
the life out of certain peculiar old women on the ground 
that they were witches. It is only a hundred and fifty 
years since the last witch was put to death by civil 
process. To-day if anyone should undertake to have a 
witch put to death he would be sent to the insane asy- 
lum or to jail. We have moved away from a vast array 
of beliefs which have been disproved and outgrown. 

The same process has been going on in religion. We 
have advanced by trial and rejection, proving all 
things, holding fast that which is good, putting the rest 
into the discard. If we had a full description of all the 
religious beliefs which have been outgrown it would 
fill the Encyclopedia Britannica. Why should not the 
world to-day be wiser religiously than it was yester- 
day? Why should not we move ahead with open minds, 
ready to know more to-morrow than we do to-day? 
Keeping the faith, then, does not mean thinking about 
things in general exactly as Methuselah did. 

In the second place keeping the faith does not mean 
that a man believes exactly what he may have believed 
ten or twenty years ago. Here was the leading apostle 
of the Christian religion, who had kept the faith in 
right royal fashion, saying in one place that great 
changes had taken place in his own religious belief. 
‘“When I was a child I thought as a child, I spoke as a 
child, I understood as a child. But when I became a man 
I put away childish things. For now we see through a 
glass darkly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, 
but then I shall know even as I am known.’’ He saw 


6 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


that, intellectually as well as morally, life is a process 
of forgetting the things which are behind and reaching 
for the things which are ahead, thus pressing toward 
the mark. No man who thinks can stand still like some 
lamp-post on the corner. 

It is perfectly clear that there was change and prog- 
ress in the views of Paul as expressed in his earlier and 
later letters. There was a time when he wrote to the 
Corinthians in scornful terms regarding marriage as 
being at best an unworthy concession to the flesh on the 
part of those who felt it better to marry than to suffer 
from uncontrollable desire. He insisted at that time 
that the celibate state was to be preferred—‘‘ He that is 
unmarried careth for the things of the Lord how he 
may please the Lord; and he that is married careth for 
the things of the world how he may please his wife.’’ 
In his later letters Paul would have married life noth- 
ing less than sacramental, urging husbands to love 
their wives as Christ loved the Church. In his view of 
the second coming of Christ and in other matters of 
belief, he shows change and progress when we come to 
read his letters in chronological order. 

When I was a child I thought as a child. We all did. 
It was the only way we could think at that stage of our 
development. I thought of God as a tall, elderly gentle- 
man, with long white hair and beard, something like my 
grandfather, who was a very handsome old man. I 
thought of Him as standing yonder among the clouds, 
watching me, especially when I had been doing some- 
thing wrong. I thought of the Bible as having been dic- 
tated to certain ‘‘sacred penmen of the Holy Ghost,’’ 
as I once heard our minister call them. I thought that 
they wrote down exactly what they were told to write, 


KEEPING THE FAITH 7 


so that there is here the infallible utterance of God 
from lid to lid. I thought of prayer as a kind of magical 
performance whereby if a man was sufficiently in 
earnest and was sure enough of himself, if he used the 
right words and was careful to close his prayer with 
some such phrase as ‘‘For Jesus’ sake,’’ he could get 
pretty much anything he chose. I thought of the future 
world as divided into two great camps, heaven and hell, 
one a place of unspeakable bliss and the other a place 
of unutterable and unending torment. I thought that 
at death each soul was sent to one of these two places 
to remain there for all eternity. When I was a child I 
thought as a child. 

But when I became a man I put away pretty much 
all of that as Paul did, as almost all sensible men do. I 
did not do it all at once. It cannot be done in a hurry. 
You can change your clothes in ten minutes, but you 
cannot change your old beliefs in a vital way over night. 
No one can pass from one point in space to another 
without passing through all the intervening points in 
order. It was a long, patient process of growth, putting 
- away childish conceptions, that I might enter into a 
more mature philosophy of life. 

I learned to think of God as resident, immanent in 
all these mighty processes, heat, light, gravitation, 
electricity, the movement of the planets, the growth of 
plant life, the growth of animal life, the growth and 
progress of human life. These mighty processes ex- 
press His power and purpose. They enfold us and bear 
us on, for in Him we live and move and are, as fish live 
in the sea. God is everywhere. 

I learned to think of the Bible as containing truths 
which had been slowly wrought into the experiences of 


8 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


men chosen for their moral capacity and spiritual in- 
sight. They too met temptation, faced duty, bore their 
sorrows, and carried their burdens, and in doing it 
learned something about the nearness and the helpful- 
ness of God. We have here the literary expression of 
that continuous and progressive revelation which God 
has been making of Himself through the best that these 
men saw and felt touching the divine presence. | 

I learned to think of prayer as communion, fellow- 
ship, codperation between these finite spirits of ours 
and the Infinite Spirit of Him who is the Source and 
Summit of all being. He is working in us and for us to 
accomplish His good pleasure. When we pray we make 
it possible for Him to work to advantage. 

I learned to think of the future life as the continu- 
ance of personal consciousness, a further opportunity 
for moral growth to be achieved by the fiery discipline 
of pain wherever we have been doing wrong, to be 
achieved in joyous satisfaction in so far as our wills 
have been brought into agreement with His perfect will. 
And I thought of this whole process as being held and 
directed by the one God and Father of us all, who is 
above all and through all and in us all. These various 
changes of belief did not mean that I had lost my faith 
—these changes of belief enabled me to keep my faith. 

In the third place then, keeping one’s faith means the 
maintenance of a certain mood and bearing toward the 
great spiritual verities. The Revised Version defines 
faith as the act of ‘‘giving substance to things hoped 
for.’’ Here are certain claims, not on the face of them 
absurd or impossible, but not susceptible of immediate 
scientific demonstration. I may accept them as furnish- 
ing a good working hypothesis for human life. By my 


KEEPING THE FAITH 9 


faith I give substance to them as things hoped for and 
begin to act accordingly. 

Then they become more real by my attitude of faith 
‘as I utilize them in the hard tests of life and try them 
out. God, prayer, duty, redemption, the sense of eternal 
life already begun—they all become intensely real as 
we live by them. Faith is the mood, the bearing, the 
response of the soul, which first gives substance to them 
as things hoped for. 

The whole structure of society rests upon that sort 
of faith. We cannot wait for scientific demonstration 
every time—we must act upon the balance of probabili- 
ties. The merchant entrusts a fortune to certain ships 
and then turns them over to the skill and fidelity of a 
few sea captains whom he scarcely knows by sight. The 
military commander stakes the outcome of a battle and 
the fate of his army upon the accuracy of a report made 
by a few scouts whom he has sent out to reconnoitre. 
I feel sick and go to the doctor. He examines me by 
methods which I do not understand and then writes 
something on a piece of paper which I cannot read. I 
take it to a drugstore and give it to a man I never saw 
before in my life. He takes it back somewhere out of 
sight and mixes up something in a bottle and tells me 
to take a teaspoonful of it three times a day. 

Now I do not and cannot know as a matter of scien- 
tific demonstration that the doctor understood my case 
or that he wrote the right prescription. I do not know 
that the druggist filled the prescription correctly—for 
anything I know the stuff in that bottle may be rank 
poison and if I take it I may be dead in an hour. But I 
put my faith in the intelligence and fidelity of those 
men—lI take my medicine and get well. Life could not 


10 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


go on if we were forever waiting for certainty. We walk 
by faith and not by sight—and religious faith is the 
readiness to act upon the intimations given to us by 
Him who is above all. 

Someone has defined faith as ‘‘that faculty by which 
the vitality of one being passes over and becomes the 
possession of another.’’ Here is a little child taken for 
the first time to a great city. He stands on Broadway, 
New York, frightened and bewildered by the noise, the 
rush, and the confusion of it all. If he were left alone 
he would be utterly overwhelmed by fear and distress. 

But the child is with his father and as they make 
their way down Broadway hand in hand, the serene 
confidence of the father passes over and becomes seren- 
ity in the heart of the child. His faith in his father gives 
substance to the security he hopes for. So the faith of a 
private soldier in his general enables him to share in 
the courage and confidence of a great commander on 
the day of battle. So the Christian’s faith in Christ be- 
comes a bridge over which the spiritual energy of the 
Master passes and becomes vital in the heart of the 
disciple. In every such case it gives substance to the 
thing hoped for and thus becomes saving. 

Now keeping the faith means to keep that mood and 
bearing however we may be compelled in the face of 
growing knowledge to modify many of our opinions. 
Your creeds as you grow older may not be so long. 
They may not have so many articles in them. The trim- 
ming and embroidery on them will be worn off here and 
there by the rub of life. The outward form of your faith 
will change and certain aspects of it may perish alto- 
gether, while the inward meaning and content of it is 
being renewed year by year. The few great, main things 


KEEPING THE FAITH 11 


which you esteem vital will become all the more real 
as the years come and go. If you stand ready to adjust 
your life to the highest you see and feel and hope for, 
you will be keeping your faith magnificently. 

It is this process, as Phillips Brooks once said, which 
makes the mature man’s faith rich and warm and real. 
It is like the house in which a family has lived for many 
years. Here the children were born; here they were 
christened ; here they played! Here the daughter stood 
in the glory of her young womanhood with the man of 
her choice by her side as they plighted their troth! 
Here we clung together when sorrow came and one was 
not. The old house is mellowed and enriched by all 
these sacred associations. It is another sort of place 
altogether from what it was when the paint and varnish 
were all fresh and everything was new and unworn. 
So the mature man’s faith by the hard tests through 
which it has carried him, by the glad triumphs it has 
brought, by the way it has enabled him to face tempta- 
tion and trial, grows warm and rich and real. 

You may or may not be able to subscribe your name 
with intellectual honesty to the Nicene Creed, the 
Athanasian Creed, the Westminster Confession and all 
the other great statements of belief as certain men 
have done in days gone by. You may or may not be able 
to announce as your own certain opinions you once held 
touching a certain body of religious doctrine. But if you 
have kept that mood and bearing toward the sublime 
verities by which men live, and if you are able to 
answer back in terms of trust and obedience, of aspira- 
tion and high resolve, then you have kept the faith. 

It would be difficult to speak too strongly of the value 
of that mood and bearing. The power of belief roots 


12 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


down into things unseen and eternal. It uncovers 
deeper sources of motive and stimulus. It offers more 
august sanctions for righteousness and more powerful 
deterrents from evil. It steadies and strengthens the 
will. It gives reach and grasp to the upward, outward, 
Godward thrust of a man’s aspiration. It calls into 
action heart and imagination so that a man cries as did 
the apostle of old, ‘‘I know whom,’’—not what— 
‘whom I have believed and I am persuaded that He is 
able to keep that which I have committed unto Him.’’ 
So the man walks on serene and undaunted, no matter 
what comes, by the power of his faith. 

When we view the matter in this more intelligent 
way, we have no occasion to lament the passing of 
what some pious souls have called ‘‘ The ages of faith.’’ 
The day for certain forms of religious credulity has 
gone—I trust forever gone. But was there ever a time 
when so many people were sure of God, a Being wise, 
powerful, beneficent, the Ground and Source of all 
finite existence, ‘‘the Power not ourselves that makes 
for righteousness’’! 

Was there ever a time when so many Herat of all 
nations and kindreds and races and tongues looked up 
into the face of Jesus Christ and saw there the glory 
of the Eternal! Not merely a wise teacher, a lovely 
example, a powerful leader, but One who is Saviour, 
Redeemer, and Lord! 

Was there ever a time when so many people, discard- 
ing the magic of prayer, believed nevertheless that it 
can change the hearts of men by its moral force and 
sweeten the whole world by its fragrance, binding it at 
last about the throne of God! Was there ever a time 
when so many people believed that in this body of 


KEEPING THE FAITH 13 


literature called the Bible we have a veritable message 
from God to the souls of men, able to make us wise unto 
salvation and furnish us thoroughly for all good work! 

Was there ever a time when so many people looked 
forward to the future world, not seeking to map it out 
into all the details of heaven and hell, but believing that 
personal consciousness does survive the shock of physi- 
cal dissolution, believing in a future state of being 
which has been brought to light by the life and teach- 
ing, by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ! 
And so long as great masses of thoughtful people main- 
tain that mood and bearing, we are keeping the faith. 

It has been my lot recently to come in contact with 
many ministers of the gospel who have grown old in 
service. Almost all of them who had heads on their 
shoulders and not merely places to wear their hats, 
had seen occasion many times to change their opinions 
touching some of the articles of belief. But they had 
kept the faith. They had boys’ hearts under their old 
jackets. They had in their souls all the bubble and 
sparkle of youth. Their natural force was not abated. 
They loved to preach the good news and to strive for 
the souls of men, to give battle for the truth and to 
believe in the coming of the kingdom, as much as they 
ever did. And by that very mood and bearing they 
showed that in right royal fashion they too had kept 
the faith. 

In the fourth place, where these readjustments are 
made aright, they bring a new sense of breadth and of 
vitality to our faith. How the very language of reli- 
gious effort has changed within the memory of many 
who still are living. Where are those men who used 
to talk about ‘‘brands snatched from the burning,’’ 


14 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


about a few souls ‘‘rescued from a sinking ship and 
gotten into the ark of safety’’; about handfuls of meal 
carried aside to receive the sacred leaven of divine 
grace; about small groups of people gathered out of 
the world, into the cloister or the Church, that they 
might be saved; about chosen people and favored 
nations made wise and good by the grace of God leav- 
ing the huge pagan populations outside in darkness 
and sin? 
_ Where are those people? They are all gone or fast 
going. You have to travel far afield to find them now. 
Yet it is only yesterday that the chief purpose of reli- 
gion in the minds of many people seemed to be the 
recovery out of a lost world of that small portion of 
it which might be saved. ; 
Look at the mood and bearing which are now in the 
ascendant! Men of faith are saying, We are not here 
to snatch brands from the burning—vwe are here to put 
out the fire of destructive evil and to make the world a 
safe place for all hands. We are not here to save a few 
lost souls from a sinking ship—we are here to make 
seaworthy the ship itself which carries all these sacred 
interests and to learn how to sail it on all the high seas 
of moral effort. We are here to put the leaven of new 
purpose boldly down into the entire mass of social and 
industrial, of educational and political relationships, 
that the whole lump of human life may be leavened. 
We are here not to get a few fortunate people out of 
the world into the Church but to get the Church itself, 
with all its saving principles and spirit, out into the 
world that the world itself may be redeemed. And 
everyone who is giving himself wisely and warmly to 


KEEPING THE FAITH 15 


that vaster undertaking is keeping the faith in a 
broader way. 

We have gone as yet only a short distance along this 
high road of spiritual effort. The kingdoms of this 
world, business and politics, education and recreation, 
have not by any means become kingdoms of our Lord 
and of His Christ. But does any man with eyes to see 
and a heart to understand, doubt but that we are 
headed right? The very fact that multitudes of clear- 
headed, honest-hearted men and women to-day are 
brave enough to undertake all that, brave enough to 
look up into the face of the infinite perfection of God 
and say, ‘‘Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on 
earth as it is in heaven,’’ indicates that we have not 
lost our faith. We are the lineal descendants of those 
men of old who through faith wrought righteousness, 
subdued kingdoms, and turned back the forces of evil. 
We, like them, having obtained a good report by faith, 
have not yet received the promise—we are steadily 
looking for that better social order which hath founda- 
tions whose builder and maker is God. 

_ Every man who grows outgrows. By your own en- 
larging faith you outgrow many of the opinions you 
once held just as you outgrew your clothes. The day 
came when the boy’s knee breeches were too short in 
the legs and too narrow in their girth. You had to dis- 
card them and take upon you the garments of maturity. 
In like manner some of your early and faulty concep- 
tions of religion showed their inadequacy to clothe the 
expanding life of the soul. They had to be let out— 
some of them you had to let go. The things you thought 
and said as a child had to be put aside to make room for 
a more mature philosophy of life. But in all these 


16 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


changes if you maintained the mood and bearing of 
trust and obedience, of aspiration and high resolve 
touching the highest you saw, then you have indeed 
kept the faith. 

The final test is that of experience. Religion is like a 
stained glass window in a church. No matter how bright 
the. day may be, you cannot see the beauty of it from 
the outside. Come in here! Come inside and look at it 
from within, then you will know. Look out upon life 
through the eyes of religious faith! Taste and see that 
the Lord is good, making proof of His claims by your 
own spiritual palate. Take His yoke upon you and learn 
of Him and you will find rest to your souls. 

Let religion be judged as other great interests are 
judged, by its power to contribute to the full develop- 
ment of honored and joyous existence for our common 
humanity. ‘‘By their fruits ye shall know.”’ It was the 
Master of all the higher values in life who proposed 
this pragmatic test, the test of experience, the ability 
or the inability of the thing under scrutiny to work out 
satisfactory results. By those tests we judge the claims 
of music, of art, of literature. We are content that 
religion should stand or fall by this same test, by its 
power to contribute to the well-rounded and satisfying 
development of human life. 

We need not be troubled by many things as Martha 
was, cumbered with much serving or dancing attend- 
ance upon the thousand and one changes in theological 
opinion. One thing is needful in the last analysis, choose 
that good part which shall not be taken away! ‘‘Here 
is the last great certainty,’’ as a great preacher once 
said to the men at Harvard, ‘‘be sure of God. By sim- 
ple, loving worship, by continual moral obedience, by 


KEEPING THE FAITH Ly, 


purifying yourself even as He is pure, creep close to 
Him, keep close to Him and in the end nothing can 
overthrow you.’’ 

When the British fleet was about to go into action 
at the Battle of Trafalgar, Lord Nelson said to an 
officer on the flagship, ‘‘Signal the fleet ‘England con- 
fides that every man will do his duty.’ ”’ 

The officer returned a moment later to say, ‘‘I have 
no signal for ‘confides’—will not ‘expects’ do just as 
well?’’ Nelson consented but his own word held the 
finer meaning. England confided that every man would 
do his duty; and England’s confidence reaching out 
from a thousand homes upon the land to those men 
upon the sea became a challenge to every man in that 
high and hard hour to do his best. England’s faith as 
expressed in the words of her great commander gave 
substance to the thing she hoped for. The men re- 
sponded—they did their duty and the victory was won. 

Signal to évery faculty in your command that you 
confide in each one to do its duty. That very attitude of 
soul will give substance to the thing you hope for and 
bring you off every field of moral struggle more than 
conqueror. 


i 4 
ts Wy Psy 


oy pe 


rads th 2 


4 
2 


{pies 
ee 





RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY IN AN 
AGE OF SCIENCE 


CHARLES A. DINSMORE 


Lecturer, Yale Diwinity School. Author of ‘‘Infe of 
Dante,’’ ‘‘ Atonement in Interature and Infe,’’ ‘‘New 
LInght on Old Truth.’’ 


CHAPTER II 


RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY IN AN AGE OF 
SCIENCE 


CHARLES A. DINSMORE 


IN front of the Art Museum in Boston is a bronze 
statue of extreme beauty and suggestiveness. It is the 
figure of an Indian, seated upon his pony, stretching 
out hands in prayer and adoration to the Great Spirit. 
Three orders of being are represented by the sculptor. 
There is the solid earth, inanimate, insensate. Upon it 
stands the pony, belonging to a higher order of exist- 
ence. Made of the dust of the ground, in him is life. He 
can adjust himself to a physical environment. Yet the 
beauty of the sunset means nothing to him, nor do the 
glory of ideals disturb his contentment. The Indian is 
formed of the dust of the earth, and of living cells like 
the animal; but a spark disturbs his clod. In his breast 
there is the push of an impulse to which the pony is an 
utter stranger. He has yearnings and aspirations which 
reach above himself. He is aware of a relationship with 
a Power above, whom he conceives as a Great Spirit, not 
unlike himself—stronger, wiser, eternal—to whom his 
heart goes out in emotions of awe, reverence, adoration. 
In the dark breast of this primitive man there is a 
sense—imperfect, indeed, but real—of an order of 
values and forces which is lifted as far above the 
animal upon which he is astride as the animal is ele- 
vated in the scale of being above the earth. 

The impulse which leads the savage to pray and to 


22 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


worship a Spirit akin to himself is part of the furniture 
of human nature. It has manifested itself in every age 
and in every race. ‘‘You may find,’’ says Plutarch, 
““communities without walls; without letters; without 
kings; without money; with no coinage; without ac- 
quaintance with theatres or gymnasia; but a com- 
munity without holy rites, without a god, that uses not 
prayer ; without sacrifice to win good or to avert evil— 
no man ever saw or will see.’’ Religion begins in this 
response of man to what he conceives to be a super- 
natural Power or Powers, the response leads to an atti- 
tude, and the attitude results in experiences which 
involve the whole man—his thoughts, his emotions, his. 
activities. 

This religious impulse may be very feeble in some 
men, for we differ in our endowments. Some are blind 
to color and others are deaf to music, and yet the reli- 
gious response is seldom lacking in a human bosom. 
The Great Mystery surrounds us all and all have some 
sense of it. 

Is our religion at its best simply a majestic and con- 
soling faith, born of our deep needs and unquenchable 
hopes, touching and vitalized by no reality, a brilliant 
dream which our imaginations have thrown against a 
dark and unreplying void? Or can we to-day in this age 
of science truly say with the holiest men of innumerable 
generations, ‘‘I know God’’? 


Play no tricks with thy Soul, O Man, 
Let facts be facts, and life the thing it can. 


That we are living in an age of science requires no 
demonstration. Its purpose is definite. It aims at noth- 
ing less than the mastery of nature by discovering and 


RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 23 


verifying its facts and setting them in their proper 
relationship. The genuine scientific spirit is thoroughly 
religious in its receptiveness; its subordination of self 
to the higher interests of truth and humanity ; its integ- 
rity and reverence. 

But science—I use the term in its popular sense—is 
strictly limited in its field of operations, and in the kind 
of knowledge it obtains. It deals only with phenomena 
and processes, it has absolutely nothing to say regard- 
ing the nature of ultimate realities. It has no answer to: 
those insistent questions which we all put to ourselves 
in our deeper moments. 

Now we are the inheritors of the faith of the fathers 
and of the achievements of science ; to the finer spirit of 
each we wish to be obedient. We believe that we honor 
God when we welcome truth from every quarter. We 
eagerly accept every fact which science establishes. We 
cordially accept the scientific spirit and apply it un- 
sparingly to our creeds, our Bible, our ecclesiastical 
traditions, to all the sources of authority. We wish to 
hold nothing that will not stand the strictest scrutiny. 

Nevertheless, we must ask some questions which 
science does not answer. And so in a universe infinitely 
rich we seek other oracles, another order of reality. 

‘*Besides the phenomena which address the senses,’’ 
said John Tyndall, ‘‘there are laws and principles 
which do not address the senses at all but are spirit- 
ually discerned.’’ This is true. The world in which we 
live has not only physical facts and forces, but also 
spiritual values which are charged with transforming 
energy. Poetry has affected human well-being as power- 
fully as Ford cars; the sighs of love have shaken men 
as perceptibly as the winds of heaven; ‘‘Before the 


24 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


saint,’’ says Nietzsche, ‘‘the strongest men in history 
have always bowed down reverently because they 
divine beyond his wretched appearance a superior force 
that will match itself against them.’’ Professor Spauld- 
ing has said that the pressure of the particles of steam 
in a piston head is as real as the particles of steam. I 
would affirm that the spiritual energy which passes 
from the saint and conquers the will of a strong man is 
as real as the pressure of steam. The holiness of Jesus 
Christ has sent down through the centuries and over 
the world a transforming power as incontestable as the 
light of the sun. In memorable words Tyndall reminded 
his fellow scientists of the reality of a higher world of 
human interests: ‘‘The world embraces not only a 
Newton, but a Shakespeare—not only a Boyle, but a 
Raphael—not only a Kant, but a Beethoven—not only 
a Darwin, but a Carlyle. Not in each of these, but in all, 
is human nature whole. They are not opposed, but 
supplementary—not mutually exclusive, but reconcil- 
able... . . And if, unsatisfied with them all, the human 
mind, with the yearning of a pilgrim for his distant 
home, will still turn to the Mystery from which it has 
emerged, seeking so to fashion it as to give unity to 
thought and faith; so long as this is done, not only 
without intolerance or bigotry of any kind, but with the 
enlightened recognition that ultimate fixity of concep- 
tion is here unattainable, and that each succeeding age 
must be held free to fashion the mystery in accordance 
with its own needs—then, casting aside all the restric- 
tions of Materialism, I would affirm this to be a field © 
for the noblest exercise of what, in contrast with the 
knowing faculties, may be called the creative faculties 
of man. Here, however, I touch a theme too great for 


RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 25 


me to handle, but which will assuredly be handled by 
the loftiest minds, when you and I, like streaks of morn- 
ing cloud, shall have melted into the infinite azure of 
the past.’’ 

These words are as rich in suggestiveness as they 
are beautiful. Mr. Tyndall recognizes that man instinc- 
tively reaches out beyond all beauty, goodness, and 
truth to that Reality of which they are expressions. He 
has religious needs which nothing but the Eternal can 
satisfy. This pilgrim yearning for home, men have 
called a thirst for God. ‘‘As the hart panteth after the 
water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.’’ 
‘““We came forth from thee,’’ exclaimed Augustine, 
‘‘and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.’’ 
Out of the Deep we came, upon the Deep we live, and to 
the Deep we return; the Deep within calls to the Deep 
without. This profound yearning of our better natures 
for a refuge in the Highest is evidence of its existence. 
In a world where there is no water there would be no 
creature that thirsted. If there were no air, there would 
be no wings; an appetite indicates that there is some- 
_ thing to satisfy it. Men would not hunger and thirst 
for God were there no home for the spirit. 

Life is an adjustment of internal relations to external 
relations. We have physical life because we have power 
to adapt ourselves to a physical environment. We have 
spiritual life because our higher natures live in vital 
touch with an environment which fashions and sustains 
them. Our religious instincts are as much a part of our 
nature as our bodily appetites, and because of them we 
turn to what Mr. Tyndall calls the Mystery, but which 
we call the Eternal God, to find unity for our thought 
and faith. The energy which science recognizes, the 


26 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


beauty which is the soul of art, the righteousness which 
ethics declares, we inevitably unify in God, affirming 
that beauty, truth, goodness, are all expressions of God, 
the ultimate Reality. We turn to God because only in 
Him do we find the total meaning and value of life. 
We trust Him not according to our understanding, but 
according to our great need. ‘‘Trembling one, pursued 
by evil, dash thyself against the bosom of thy God,’’ 
reads a Babylonian tablet four thousand years old, and 
in every age men have sought refuge in the Hternal. 
We are well aware that our conceptions of this God are. 
entirely inadequate. We cannot throw the girdle of our 
thought about the uncreated. In the fullness of His 
being He is infinitely beyond the reach of our imagina- 
tion. His ways are not our ways, nor His thoughts our 
thoughts. 

Gilbert Murray, in his charming essay entitled Reli- 
gio Grammatici, declares that the chief purpose of reli- 
gion is to give liberty. ‘‘Man is imprisoned in the 
eternal present; and what we call a man’s religion is to 
a great extent the thing which offers him a secret and 
permanent means of escape from that prison, a break- 
ing of the prison walls which leaves him standing, of 
course still in the present, but in a present so enlarged 
and enfranchised that it becomes not a prison, but a 
free world.’’ Religion gives men the power to overcome 
the world. It enables the believer to stand amid the 
hoarfrost and ashes, the pain, the tragedy, the failures 
of life, not merely with stoical indifference, but with a 
deep peace in his heart and a shout of triumph on his 
lips. 

Note the significance of this. Liberty, peace, joy, 
power, these are the permanent and loftiest aspirations 


RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 27 


of men. Liberty has been the banner under which the 
suffering ages have fought. It is the ideal toward which 
they have toiled. To be at peace with one’s self and 
with one’s environment is our dream of beatitude. To 
get power and joy men search earth and heaven. Yet 
those who have that quality which we recognize as reli- 
gious have as an immediate possession those values 
which are the aspiration of the race and the noblest 
goal of history. The religious mind has this instant pos- 
session because it conceives itself intersphered with 
Something higher than itself upon which it can repose 
with confidence, and from which comes spiritual vitality. 

There are three orders of human interest; the physi- 
cal world with which science deals, the world of beauty 
and goodness recognized by art and ethics, and the 
world of religion which interprets them all and then 
goes on to affirm an Unseen Helper who aids us in our 
attainment of beauty and goodness. The difference 
between the world of ethical values and religion is the 
difference between the seventh and eighth chapters of 
the Epistle to the Romans. Paul had a vivid apprecia- 
tion of the realities of the moral ideal and he aspired 
to reach it, but the power was lacking. The good that 
he would do he could not, and the evil he hated, that he 
did. ‘‘O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me 
from the body of this death?’’ Religion is the percep- 
tion and the experience of Another, like us, above us, 
within us, reinforcing our defeated wills and giving us 
the victory. 

Can we have certainty of this Other, this Unseen 
Friend, comparable to the certainty which science has 
of the material with which it works? What I wish to 
establish is the fact that a portion of our majestic faith 


28 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


grows into certainty, and certainty rests upon such evi- 
dence that it becomes knowledge as real as science 
possesses and of a higher rank. 

Let us start with a clear definition of certainty and 
knowledge. Certainty is an assured conviction that 
something is so and not otherwise. It is entirely subjec- 
tive and may be an illusion. Knowledge is to have 
assurance upon proper evidence that our mental per- 
ceptions and apprehensions agree with reality. Sub- 
jectively there is certainty, objectively there is reality, 
the connecting link is proper evidence that the inner 
persuasion tallies with the outer reality. We are willing 
to grant that the scientists have knowledge; but it is 
knowledge of a limited kind, knowledge of phenomena 
and processes, not of ultimate realities, nor of mean- 
ings. 

There is a moral order which we know with the same 
certainty that we know the physical. Huxley, in a letter 
to Charles Kingsley, said: ‘‘The more I know inti- 
mately the lives of other men (to say nothing of my 
own) the more obvious is it to me that the wicked does 
not flourish nor is the righteous punished. The Ledger 
of the Almighty is strictly kept, and every one of us 
has the balance of his operations paid over to him at 
the end of every minute of his existence. . . . The abso- 
lute justice of the system of things is as clear to me as 
any scientific fact. The gravitation of sin to sorrow is 
as certain as that of the earth to the sun, and more so— 
for experimental proof of the fact is within reach of us 
all—nay is before us all in our lives, if we had but the 
eyes to see it.’? The knowledge we have of ethical values 
and laws is not the same kind of knowledge which we 
have of physical facts and laws, but it is valid knowl- 


RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 29 


edge. The evidences differ and are arrived at by differ- 
ent methods of procedure, but the results are equally 
indubitable. 

Have we knowledge of the concern of religion? Both 
science and religion begin with an act of faith. Science 
trusts the general credibility of the sense perceptions 
and the conclusions of the understanding, religion 
trusts the intuitions and the emotions of man’s higher 
nature. Both assume a Something external to the mind 
of man. The scientist, when he speaks of it, calls it 
power or energy; the religious man calls it God. The 
method of science is experiment, the method of religion 
is experience. It appeals to life, the whole of life, and 
life under all conditions. Its knowledge is the experi- 
ence of humanity throughout the full range of history. 

What are a few of the facts and truths which we have 
learned? We know as well as we know our own exist- 
ence and in every act of our existence a Power not our- 
selves. That Power streaming through our physical 
nature gives us physical life and its laws; that Power 
streaming through our higher natures sets for us ideals 
of transcendent excellence. These ideals of moral worth 
did not spring out of the dust of the earth, they did not 
originate in experience, they transcend it. 


_ In man’s self arise 
August anticipations, symbols, types 
Of a dim splendor ever on before. 


Working within us is the push of a Power to partici- 
pate in these ideals of supreme value. We needs must 
love the highest when we see it, and loving we are under 
constraint to obey. We know that within us and around 
us there is the urge of a Power that makes for right- 


30 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


eousness. We know also that when we struggle for the 
supreme ideals we are sustained by ministries of help 
from the Unseen. 

More than this, when a man seeks to cooperate with 
this Power that is working for righteousness, he finds 
that the latent energies of his nature are released. At 
the close of the War a governor of one of our states, 
addressing the returned soldiers, used these memorable 
words, ‘‘We welded ourselves to our duty as by fire, 
and there stole into our minds a supernal illumination, 
and into our hearts a mysterious strength.’’ This ex-. 
perience is ever reproduced in all who weld themselves 
as by fire to duty, to truth, to beauty, to righteousness. 
The illumination and the mysterious strength never 
fail. ‘‘I considered myself,’’ said John Milton, when he 
threw himself into the struggle for English liberty, ‘‘a 
member incorporate of that truth whereof I was per- 
suaded.’’ When one makes such a complete dedication 
of himself to truth his brain grows clear, his will 
strong, and something of the splendor of truth descends 
upon him. 

The long experience of man goes to show that what 
we call the moral virtues—righteousness and goodness 
in all their forms—have survival value. They conform 
to the Nature of Things. When man battles for them he 
is not struggling in a vacuum, he is sustained. He finds 
the Other in nature cooperating with him. 

But, it may be objected, the argument that God is 
righteous and good because there are moral forces in 
the world is a two-edged sword. Evil and ugliness are 
also here, and most potent forces are they. True. But 
the universe is not indifferent. Two streams flow forth 
from the central Fountain of Power. One is good, and 


RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 31 


the other is evil, and we should be hopelessly puzzled 
as to the nature of the fountain, did not a third stream 
go with them—the conviction that the good is superior 
to the evil. We are so constituted that we are convinced 
that the good is better both in value and power. We find 
that evil is self-destroying, the good is self-sustaining. 
‘‘The evil that men do,’’ said Mark Antony, ‘‘lives 
after them. The good is oft interred with their bones.’’ 
It may seem so for a day, or a generation, but it is not 
true ultimately. The evil that made Rome a cesspool 
has been absorbed in the earth. The poetry, the oratory, 
the justice, the heroism of Rome, are still a beneficent 
force. The evils which destroyed Athens have gone 
glimmering into oblivion; the beauty of her temples, 
the wisdom of her philosophers, the insight of her 
poets, are part of the wealth of to-day. 


Only the virtues of the just 
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust. 


Not only does this Power not ourselves work for 
righteousness, but it works so earnestly that wherever 
evil appears and its true nature becomes apparent 
abundant forces are released for its destruction. Paul 
stated this truth long ago. ‘‘Where sin abounded grace 
did much more abound.’’ Let an evident evil appear in 
any community or nation, and gradually there are 
liberated moral forces which subdue it and thus the 
world moves forward. The tides of the divine energy 
in man rise slowly, but they are as sure as the floods 
of ocean. 

Another conspicuous truth has come out of human 
experience. Samson stated it in his famous riddle. ‘‘Out 
of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong 


32 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


came forth sweetness.’’ This world of ours is so con- 
stituted that good does come out of evil; weakness 
turns into strength, darkness is transmuted into light. 
Every sad experience of life is the raw material out of 
which the wise and valiant spirit of man can fashion 
wisdom, goodness, and moral heroism. ‘‘ There is some 
soul of goodness in things evil,’’ said Shakespeare, 
‘‘would men observingly distil it out.’’ This insight of 
our greatest poet is true. The valor of the moral will in 
man in its struggle for perfection finds latent in the 
grimmest facts, and streaming through the most un- 
propitious circumstances, a cooperating spiritual 
energy by which ugliness is turned into beauty and evil 
becomes the instrument of good. 

This is our affirmation. God and the unseen world 
are not merely objects of surmise. We know them in 
experience. In the process of building character we 
have genuine knowledge of the forces which enter 
vitally into those characters. We experience and know 
a Power which makes for ideals of worth and sustains 
us in our struggle to attain them. We know many of 
the laws of the kingdom, and multitudes testify to the 
wonders of its consolations. Therefore we hold that the 
difference between science and religion is not the differ- 
ence between knowledge and faith, between certitude 
and belief, but between two different kinds of knowl- 
edge. Hach begins in an act of faith, each attains to its 
own peculiar knowledge, then each by giving substance 
to things not seen advances to further acquisition. One 
gains knowledge through the senses, the other through 
the heart and will. But there is this difference to be 
noted between scientific and religious knowledge. The 
scientist can verify his facts to competent minds by an 


RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 33 


experiment which is performed within a given time. 
But to prove that righteousness exalteth a nation re- 
quires the experience of many generations. Moreover, 
scientific knowledge is independent of the personal 
equation. A murderer can perform a chemical experi- 
ment as well as a saint. But religion is more personal. 
Its knowledge is conditioned on character. Only the 
pure in heart see God. Only the lover can know love; 
the doors of the kingdom are shut to the proud and 
the selfish. Our moods also have much to do with our 
apprehension of all spiritual values. We live on the 
border line of the physical and the spiritual. If we 
were wholly of the earth we should never dream of the 
higher realities. If we were wholly spiritual, we should 
never doubt them; but because we belong partly to the 
seen and partly to the Unseen, vision alternates with 
doubt. On these conditions we hold our knowledge. The 
perception of religious and ethical values and forces is 
so vitally influenced by our moral and spiritual condi- 
tion that our certitude is sometimes shadowed. The 
stars still shine, but the clouds cover them, God seems 
to forsake us and the walls of the celestial city lose 
their lustre. This condition we recognize and take 
account of, as we do the mists which obscure the moun- 
tains, and the ebb and flow of the ocean. 

As if to counterbalance this we find that religious 
knowledge is more intimate than scientific knowledge. 
The mathematician knows about his circles and angles; 
the musician knows much about music, but he also 
knows music. The lover does not know about love, he 
knows love; the saint tastes the very flavor of holiness. 
The scientist knows something about the forces with 
which he deals; the lover, the artist, the saint, know 


34 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


the quality of the values they apprehend. Thus reli- 
gious apprehension seems to reach nearer the heart of 
the truth than scientific knowledge. 

Science deals with the world out there beyond us. It 
knows only symbols of reality which are interpreted to 
the consciousness through the senses. But when we 
deal with what takes place in our own inner conscious- 
ness we send the shaft down deeper into reality. There 
if anywhere we touch reality in its completest sense. 
‘‘By being religious,’’ says Professor James, ‘‘we 
establish ourselves in possession of Ultimate Reality 
at the only point at which reality is given us to equal.’’ 

I dissent emphatically from Mr. Tyndall’s statement 
that science employs the knowing faculties and reli- 
gion the creative. By our imagination we indeed shape 
our conception of God, but we experience reality. 

Beyond and above what we know stretches the majes- 
tic and glowing world of what we believe. Our faith may 
be severely rational, but it is not knowledge. This is 
not to disparage faith. To live greatly in this world 
one must root his nature in vast and tremendous be- 
liefs. Out of faith came the songs of the world, and all 
high art, and thought. It is the eye of faith that sees 
the broad horizons, the color, and the gleam. Religion 
standing on the known experience of the race makes 
one bold and glorious affirmation. She asserts that this 
Power that makes for truth, for beauty, for goodness, 
is not less personal than we. This leap of faith is justi- 
fied, because God cannot be less than the greatest of His 
works; the Cause must be adequate to the effect. When 
therefore we call God personal we have interpreted 
Him by the loftiest symbol we have. He may be infi- 
nitely more, He cannot be less. When we call God a 


RELIGIOUS CERTAINTY 35 


spirit, we use the clearest lens we have to look at the 
Everlasting. As Herbert Spencer has so well said, 
‘‘The choice is not between a personal God and some 
thing lower, but between a personal God and something 
higher.’’ 





EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 


RICHARD 8. LULL 


Professor Vertebrate Paleontology, Yale Umversity. 
Director Peabody Museum. Author and editor of ‘‘The 
Evolution of the Earth and Its Inhabitants.’’ 


CHAPTER III 
EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 
RICHARD 8S. LULL 


THE last year or two have witnessed a revival of the 
age-old warfare between science and religion, due in 
part to the emotionalism which invariably follows a 
_ great war, and in part to a misinterpretation of certain 
questions which have arisen within the ranks of science 
itself as to the causes of evolution, and which have been 
thought by the nonscientific to be evidences of disbelief 
in the doctrine of evolution itself. I wish, therefore, to 
tell you something of the development of the evolu- 
tionary idea, and of the extent and sureness of its 
acceptance as the only logical explanation of the phe- 
nomena of life. 

The question of origins has been before the minds of 
men for thousands of years, and stories of creation 
appear in the sacred writings of many peoples, each 
one builded up of fragments from those which have 
gone before. Thus, from the Hebrew scripture comes 
what has been taught to many of us as the verbally 
inspired story, told with beautiful simplicity, as to a 
child, and sufficient to satisfy the minds of the primi- 
tive people whose sages penned the theme. But we are 
told by high authority (Clay) that back of the Mosaic 
account lies that in the Assyrian writings, certainly the 
prototype, and most surely the origin, of the Genesis 
story. Back of the Assyrian, in turn, lie other creation 
myths, all in the nature of folk-lore, handed down by 


40 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


word of mouth for thousands of years, and having their 
origin in the sombre shadows of prehistory. 

I do not know in how far the priests of Israel insisted 
on the literal interpretation of the Mosaic story of the 
creation, and certainly among our Lord’s recorded say- 
ings there is no restatement of the theme, but the 
authorities of the Christian Church, despite the broader 
vision of certain of her disciples, such as Gregory of 
Nyssa and St. Augustine, became more and more insist- 
ent, until to doubt the verbal inspiration, and hence 
the literal interpretation, was to dare persecution or 
even death. 

Father Suarez, a sixteenth-century Jesuit, was most 
rigid in his interpretation, and such was his influence 
upon the Roman Catholic followers of Europe that the 
story as he told it became the only orthodox belief for 
at least three hundred years, and for aught I know may 
yet be held to be. His statement, as quoted by Huxley, 
was as follows: 


The world was made in six natural days. On the first of these 
days the materia prima was made out of nothing, to receive 
afterwards those ‘‘substantial forms’’ which moulded it into 
the universe of things; on the third day, the ancestors of all 
living plants came into being, full-grown, perfect, and pos- 
sessed of all the properties which now distinguish them; while, 
on the fifth and sixth days, the ancestors of all existing animals 
were similarly caused to exist in their complete and perfect 
state, by the infusion of their appropriate material substan- 
tial forms into the matter which had already been created. _ 
Finally, on the sixth day, the anima rationalis—that rational 
and immortal substantial form which is peculiar to man—was 
created out of nothing, and ‘‘breathed into’’ a mass of matter 
which, till then, was mere dust of the earth, and so man arose. 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 41 


But the species man was represented by a solitary male indi- 
vidual, until the Creator took out one of his ribs and fashioned 
it into a female. 


What Father Suarez did for Europe, John Milton 
did for Protestant England, not, however, through 
vested ecclesiastical authority, but because of the pro- 
found influence that his Paradise Lost had upon the 
Hnglish-speaking race. You remember his vivid pictur- 
ing of the great creative movement in the sixth book— 
how the various brutes sprang full-formed from 
Mother Harth. So strong a hold had this epic upon the 
people that Huxley was accustomed to speak of the 
‘‘Miltonic theory of creation’’ rather than of the 
Mosaic account. 

The curious anomaly of the creation of light and 
darkness before the sun, moon, and stars, the manifest 
sources of light, disturbed none but a scientist, but the 
theologians themselves were somewhat at a loss to 
make the two accounts in the first and second chapters 
of Genesis agree, in that the former extends the crea- 
tion over six days, while the latter seems to hold that 
the entire creation took place within a day. St. Thomas 
Aquinas reconciled the two accounts by stating his 
belief that the substance of things was created instan- 
taneously, but that the separation and adorning took 
six days more. 

The eighteenth century saw the rise of several great 
thinkers—philosophers and naturalists who were 
gifted with a clearer vision than were their predeces- 
sors. One notably, Carolus Linnaeus (1707-1778), a 
Swedish naturalist, although adhering to the special 
creation doctrine, nevertheless did much to stimulate 
zoological research by his masterly contributions to 


42 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


that science. He listed, described, and named with the 
double Latin names found in our present usage, some 
six thousand species in his Systema Naturae, which 
was published in 1735. Linnaeus did, however, in spite 
of his adhesion to the Mosaic doctrine, believe in cer- 
tain post-creation changes. Thus, at the creation each 
genus represented a specially created type, but the 
several species of that type have been differentiated 
since, some by cross-breeding or hybridizing, others, as 
in certain parasitic forms, by degeneracy arising from 
their peculiar mode of life. 

In addition to the increasing knowledge of recent 
animals, light was to come from another source of en- 
quiry. A certain group of phenomena with which the 
writer is professionally concerned, namely, fossils, had 
been for a long time attracting the attention of divers 
men, although without any true appreciation of their 
significance. The ancients thought these objects to be 
merely the relics from some inundation, such as the 
Noachian deluge, or, according to the Greeks, the flood 
occurring during the time of Deucalion and Pyrrha; 
and that, although often found high on the hills sur- 
rounding the Mediterranean or Adriatic, they differed 
not at all from animals alive in the seas to-day. Yet 
others regarded fossils as the failures of a creative 
force within the earth, due no doubt to their occasional 
obscurity of appearance in the older rocks. Still others, 
those who pictured the creation as an actual manual 
labor of the Almighty, held the belief that these relics 
were models or patterns by means of which the more 
perfect living things were produced. 

A fourth group held fossils to have been placed in the 
earth by Satan, either to mar the Creator’s handiwork, 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 43 


or to tempt the unwary away from the strait and nar- 
row path of revealed religion; while the prehistoric 
implements were regarded as the weapons of Satan’s 
expulsion from Paradise. 

From the theologians’ standpoint, however, the most 
satisfying explanation of all was that fossils were 
formed for some inscrutable purpose of the Almighty. 
Thus they came to lie outside the pale of investigation, 
and this became the orthodox belief. 

Leonardo da Vinci, whom most of us know as an 
inspired painter, was also. an architect and engineer. 
While building canals in northern Italy, he became 
interested in the fossil shells which his workmen ex- 
humed and brought to him for explanation, and he it 
was who first recognized them for what they were: the 
actual relics of bygone animals; and to this day the 
great amphitheater at Verona, begun under the reign 
of Diocletian in 290 a.p., and restored by Leonardo in 
the sixteenth century, has beautiful specimens of forms 
allied to the living pearly nautilus embedded in the 
rock-hewn seats. 

In Paris during the time of Napoleon the Great there 
dwelt one of the most brilliant of French scientists, 
Baron Cuvier, favorite of the emperor, and a man of 
high scientific and social prestige. The founder of my 
own branch of science, comparative anatomy and ver- 
tebrate paleontology, Cuvier, because of his connection 
with the Sorbonne and the great natural history mu- 
seum at the Jardin des Plantes, had the opportunity to 
become familiar at first hand with animals from all 
over the globe. Thus when bones were brought to light 
in the gypsum quarries of Montmartre, within the en- 
virons of the city of Paris itself, none was better fitted 


44 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


than he to pass judgment upon them. This he undertook 
to do, and upon comparing them with existing types, he 
soon realized that he was dealing with strange and 
unknown creatures which, while showing many points 
of analogy with living forms, were clearly not the same. 
But Cuvier was a special creationist, despite the fact 
that certain of his fellow savants held other views of 
animal and plant origins. Hence he advanced the theory 
of catastrophisms to account for the passing of these 
strange creatures, such as some devastating though 
local crustal disturbance and consequent incursion of . 
the sea. He believed, if we interpret him aright, that a 
reéstablishment of previous conditions and a conse- 
quent withdrawal of the sea left that part of Kurope 
again fitted for living inhabitants, the immediate an- 
cestors of the present-day creatures. These he thought 
came from some other region untouched by the catas- 
trophe, and represented forms in every way as much 
part of the original creation as were those which 
Nature had destroyed. This interpretation sufficed 
until geologists, delving in the older strata, found more 
and yet more primitive creatures, so that there were 
recognized no fewer than twenty-seven such faunas, 
each apparently separated from its immediate succes- 
sor by some widespread death-dealing cause. However, 
Cuvier’s method of repopulation by immigration did 
not suffice, so the creation belief was extended to in- 
clude at least twenty-seven distinct creative acts, the 
last destructive agent being the biblical flood, which 
was survived by a selection of the antediluvial crea- 
tures through the divinely directed activity of Noah. 
The fact that this belief, advocated by the geologist 
D’Orbigny, thus drew upon the biblical narrative for 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 45 


its completion, gave it a certain acceptance by theolo- 
gian and scientist as well, and thus it had the stamp of 
orthodoxy. But it pictures, not an omniscient Creator, 
but rather an experimentalist, somewhat inexperi- 
enced at first, whose products were crude and unfit to 
endure. These His wrath destroyed, and experiment 
succeeded experiment until the existing perfection was 
attained. 

Over against the catastrophists arose another school, 
the uniformitarians, whose study of geological phenom- 
ena led them to deny all cataclysms, and to argue that 
the present-day forces—rain, frost, river and sea 
action, earthquake and volcanic activity—suffice to 
account for all the changes that the world has under- 
gone, without periodic increase in intensity or violence ; 
and that as the earth’s surface has suffered gradual 
but continuous change, so organic life is in a continual 
state of extremely deliberate but corresponding altera- 
tion. That there were periods of relative quickening of 
both movements, as in times of climatic stress like the 
last glacial period, with a corresponding influence on 
life, there is no doubt, and in this way there is a certain 
measure of truth in the cataclysmic theory, but that 
there were successive re-creations all scientists to-day 
deny. 

They believe, on the other hand, that life was formed 
but once, at least on earth, and that out of that single 
creation of one or very few forms all the varied and 
various organic beings, from the humblest to the 
mightiest, both plant and animal, now and in the past, 
have arisen. The process whereby this differentiation 
has been brought about we call an unfolding, or evolu- 
tion, and we see in it the grand result of the interwork- 


46 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


ings of the laws of life and matter, but the source of 
those laws, and the complete understanding of them 
seem to lie beyond the ken of scientific research. This 
does not in the least forbid their investigation, as did 
the theologians with their ban of inscrutability, but 
holds merely that their complexity is such, and their 
time of origin so remote, that final solution, as the 
scientific mind solves problems, seems doubtful. 

The belief in evolution is not new. In fact, it is older 
by far than the Christian era, for the Greeks, particu- 
larly Anaximander, Empedocles, and Aristotle, wrote © 
much of nature, and seemed to recognize, not alone the 
continuity therein, but something of the processes 
which have given rise to organic change. The influence 
of the Church was such, however, that the light the 
ancients had was. largely dimmed until the coming of 
the eighteenth-century naturalists to whom I have 
referred—Buffon, Erasmus Darwin, St. Hilaire, La- 
marck, and later Charles Darwin—each one of whom 
contributed his share to the establishment of the evolu- 
tionary theory, although we do not always agree with 
their teaching. It was the great Darwin particularly 
who, by his most detailed and painstaking research, 
made general acceptance of the doctrine possible, for 
he founded his beliefs on such a varied host of observed 
facts that he gave to what had been up to his time a 
plausible theory, the status of a great natural law. 
About the fact of evolution there is to-day not the 
slightest doubt in the mind of any scientist, but Dar- 
winism, which is not the same, but refers rather to 
certain causal factors advocated by Darwin himself, is 
not so widely accepted. The difference of opinion 
among scientific workers concerning these various fac- 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION AT 


tors has led the unscientific to infer a disagreement 
over the acceptance of the law of evolution itself, and 
has been used by the so-called antievolutionists as an 
argument that belief in the doctrine is wavering and 
may fail. 

Many theologians of to-day agree with the scientists 
that this theory of the potential creation—for such 
organic evolution may be said to be—is the only logical 
conclusion to be drawn from the great array of observ- 
able facts within the range of each one’s individual 
experience. Its acceptance, however, was gradual, as 
it certainly does not accord with the strictly interpreted 
Mosaic story. Several of our modern conceptions have 
had a similar history, among them that of the form of 
the universe and the movements of the earth and other 
celestial bodies, for while not so concisely told as was 
the creation story, nevertheless they are seemingly 
upheld by numerous scriptural passages, which com- 
bined seemed abundant justification for the older be- 
liefs. Does not the Psalmist say the earth is fixed that 
it shall not be moved, and did not Joshua command the 
sun to stand still while he captured the stronghold of 
Canaan? Father Melchior Inchofer, S.J., wrote in 
1631: 


The opinion of the earth’s motion is of all heresies the most 
abominable, the most pernicious, the most scandalous; the 
immovability of the earth is thrice sacred; arguments against 
the immortality of the soul, the existence of God, and the 
incarnation should be tolerated sooner than an argument to 
prove that the earth moves. 


The law of earth movement was finally established 
by Copernicus and Galileo, the latter by his telescope 


48 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


in 1616. He was, however, forced to recant in 1633, when 
his resistance was weakened by age, and his confession 
was sent abroad as a warning to philosophers and 
mathematicians. The final concession of the Church of 
Rome was not granted until 1829, and only in 1835 was 
the earth-movement condemnation omitted from the 
Index. 

It was said of the establishment of the law of gravity 
that ‘‘Newton removed God from his universe and put 
a law in His place,’’ not realizing that the law of grav- 
ity is alaw of God. So it is with evolution, and, as these - 
other great truths have been established despite the 
most influential opposition, so this must surely be. 

Certain antievolution leaders would permit us to 
teach the evolution of lower forms of life if we leave 
man out of consideration. This, however, is an utterly 
illogical thing to do. Physical man is as surely the 
result of evolutionary laws as are any of his fellow 
creatures, for although he has probably been aloof from 
his nearest allies for a million or more years, he was 
not always so. He is one with the rest of animate crea- 
tion, the product of precisely the same laws and 
processes. 

Man’s kinship with the rest of the animal kingdom is 
abundantly attested, and this is no new invention, for 
did not the Schoolmen speak of him as animal ration- 
ale? That he is one with them is shown in numerous 
ways, among the most significant of which is the sure- 
ness with which he can be placed in the classificatory 
scheme. As a back-boned animal, a mammal, a primate, 
there is no ambiguity about man as there often is 
among lower forms of life. His nearest relatives, the 
great or anthropoid apes, are strikingly similar, bone 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 49 


for bone, muscle for muscle, organ for organ, and these 
by a method of transplanting may actually be inter- 
changed. The nervous systems differ in proportions, 
complexity, and size of brain—differences of degree, 
not of kind—and the functions are so similar that much 
of our knowledge of the workings of the human nervous 
system has been gained through experimentation on 
the apes. They have similar bodily ailments, are tor- 
mented by similar parasites, and a very subtle and 
ingenious blood-test, which, it is said, might be used 
for a second judgment of Solomon, points not only to 
relationship, but to a nearness of relationship between 
man and the gorilla and the orang far closer than be- 
tween these apes and the lesser primates. Human de- 
velopment, including growth of body from a single 
minute cell, growth of mind, maturity, old age, and 
death, is similar to that of other animals. This de- 
velopmental history of the individual is an accepted 
fact. Is it any more difficult to accept the approximately 
parallel evolution of the human race? 

Several fossil human species have been discovered 
showing a definite gradation of change, in size, posture, 
limb proportions, form of skull and jaws and teeth, and 
of the enclosed brain, whose mental attributes are 
clearly indicated. These form a rapidly growing body 
of documentary evidence for man’s evolution which, 
while subject to the criticism of willful disbelief, is 
nevertheless receiving greater and greater apprecia- 
tion for what it is. 

Mr. Bryan’s text, In His Image, based upon a deep 
and widespread conviction that man was created in the 
physical image of his Maker, pictures God the Infinite 
in terms of a finite being. This we hold to be an irrever- 


50 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


ent conception, owing to the physical imperfections of 
the human mechanism. The famous physicist Helm- 
holtz once said of the human eye: ‘‘If an optician sent 
it to me as an instrument, I should send it back with 
reproaches for his carelessness and demand the return 
of my money.’’ Throughout the human body there are 
many structures, certain of which are of the nature of 
vestigial organs, which had a very valuable function in 
our ancestors, as they have to-day in distantly related 
forms, but which, if our interpretation of them be cor- 
rect, are no longer of service, and in some instances, 
due to their proneness to disease, may be actually a 
menace to health or survival. These Drummond called 
the scaffolding left from the building of the body, and 
as such only are they understandable. It is impossible 
for one to imagine an all-wise Creator thus fashioning 
by direct creation so faulty a thing, and especially to 
conceive of its being an exact or even approximate copy 
of divine organization. Romanes, indeed, remarks that 
in creating man the Deity took most scrupulous pains 
to make him in the image of the beasts. That God can 
and did take a human form is manifest in the Incarna- 
tion. ‘‘ Jesus, being in the form of God, . . . made him- 
self of no reputation and took upon him the form of a 
servant and was made in the likeness of man; he hum- 
bled himself and became obedient unto death’’ (Philip- 
pians 2: 5-8). Does not the creation of man in the image 
of God refer rather to man’s spiritual nature than to 
his physical nature? 

Hividences of human immortality are not directly 
forthcoming as a result of scientific investigation, for 
this has to do rather with observed fact concerning the 
physical universe and the conclusions to be drawn 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 51 


therefrom, than with the mystical side. It does not, on 
the other hand, disprove it, and so widespread an in- 
stinct lodged in the breast of every type of man, to the 
uttermost savage, becomes a very real thing. The 
reverential laying away of the dead, not alone by exist- 
ing man, but by extinct species, some of whom prac- 
ticed it twenty-five to forty thousand years ago, points 
to the immense antiquity of the belief, nor do I believe 
that this is the anterior limit, for the older fossil men 
are known thus far only from a few accidental or 
natural, not intentional, burials. 

On the origin of the human soul science is also silent. 
Was it also the result of evolution? It may have been; 
or a divine awakening of an already evolved body, as 
when God ‘‘breathed into his nostrils the breath of life 
and man became a living soul’’ (Genesis 2:7). A splen- 
did book, just published, Man and the Attainment of 
Immortality, by Professor J. Y. Simpson, who has suc- 
ceeded Henry Drummond at the University of Edin- 
burgh, discusses this problem from the scientific point 
of view. 

The theistic evolutionist does not deny the Creator 
nor the creative act; he is concerned only with the 
method of creation, with ‘‘God’s way of doing things,’’ 
whether by direct or immediate creation, as the literal 
interpretation of Genesis seems to teach; or by experi- 
mental creation and repeated attempts to populate the 
earth, with cataclysmal destruction of organic life after 
each re-creation, until ultimately ‘‘God saw that it was 
good’’; or by potential creation of matter and energy 
and the laws which govern their interactions, as a 
result of which there were: 

1. A cosmic evolution of the heavenly bodies out of 


52 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


chaos—millions of suns and their planetary systems, 
covering inconceivably vast realms of space. Neither 
of the two great theories of earth origin, the Laplacian 
nebular hypothesis and the aggregation theory of 

Chamberlin, is entirely satisfying. ; 

2. A progressive evolution of the form and structure 
of the physical earth itself. Of this there is not the 
least doubt, and instead of theories to account for 
earth’s surface changes, we have a record of facts, 
some of which (earth subsidence and elevation, deposi- 
tion of sediments and erosion, earthquake and volcanic 
action) are matters of present-day observation. 

3. An evolution of organic life on earth, based upon 
the plasticity and reactions of animals and plants under 
domestication, and the observed series of organisms 
and their orderly progression from lower to higher 
forms in the geologic past. 

4. A culmination of organic evolution in modern 
man, based upon an ental attested array of facts 
derived from developmental history, comparative 
anatomy, and especially from paleontology. The known 
series of fossil men, associated, as they sometimes were, 
with animals which, like the mammoth, have entirely 
vanished from the earth, have an antiquity which vastly 
antedates the creation date of the older theologians. 
If I sought for the actual common ancestor of man and 
the anthropoids, I should go back at least as far again, 
for the human stock is very old. 

The principle of continuity of creation seems to be 
the only logical conclusion to be drawn from the vast’ 
array of proved facts which have been revealed to us. 
To ignore these facts, and to try to revive worn-out 
and generally fantastic beliefs, all of which are merely 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 53 


man-made, will be in the end futile, for truth is mighty 
and will prevail. 

Our opponents contend that the theistic evolutionists 
put God so far away as to make Him no longer a per- 
sonal factor in our lives. We feel that this is not so, 
that the God of the evolutionist is an immanent God, 
and as such a much more continuous and potent factor 
in our lives than was the occasional wonder-working 
God of the older theology. As Drummond said: ‘‘If 
God appears periodically, he disappears periodically. 
_ If he comes on the scene at special crises, he is absent 
from the scene in the interval.’’ Is the all-God or the 
occasional-God the nobler theory? 

I do not see the so-called harmfulness of the evolu- 
tion doctrine merely because it is not directly taught 
in the Bible, for the Bible says not one word of physics, 
of chemistry, of anatomy, or of geology, and it should 
not be taken as a text-book of science, but rather as a 
spiritual guide. The assumption that a lowly origin be- 
littles man is hardly true, for his direct origin from 
the dust of the earth gives him no greater claim to 
dignity than does his triumphant emergence from the 
condition of his prehuman ancestors. Nor has belief in 
evolution anything to do with the spiritual-mindedness 
of the believer, for while there may not be relatively as 
many religious-minded scientists as there are of the 
nonscientific, it is due rather to habit of thought and 
the character of the scientific mind, which require tan- 
gible demonstration of facts for their acceptance. The 
scientist’s whole life is a continual searching after 
truth, but there must be utter honesty, no jumping to 
conclusions, and no guesswork, or the scientific reputa- 
tion is imperiled. It was this attitude of mind that led 


54 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


‘Huxley to coin the word ‘‘agnostic’’ for an honest 
doubter whose lack of religious belief lay not in oppo- 
sition, but merely in lack of satisfying proof. It is often 
more difficult for the scientific mind to accept a doctrine 
purely on faith, but I am sure that belief in a divine 
Author and Upholder of the universe is more wide- 
spread among my colleagues than is generally sup- 
posed, largely because their adhesion to outward reli- 
gious form may not be so extensive. But the belief in 
evolution as the rational explanation of organic, includ- 
ing human, origins is entirely aside from religious 
conviction, and their so-called antagonism is largely 
imaginary. As Fosdick says: ‘‘The real enemies of the 
Christian faith are not the evolutionary biologists,’’ 
but those who ‘‘insist on setting up artificial adhesions 
between Christianity and outgrown scientific opinions 
and proclaim that we can not have the one without the 
other,’’ a revival of the fifteenth-century teachings of 
Peter Martyr, who said: ‘‘If.a wrong opinion should 
obtain regarding the creation as described in Genesis, 
all the promises of Christ fall into nothing, and all of 
the life of our religion would be lost.’’ 

To quote, finally, President Pritchett of the Carnegie 
Foundation: 


The widespread influence of science in the last half-century 
—not alone in physical science, but in the development of his- 
torical criticism—has committed thinking men unreservedly 
to what is called the scientific method in dealing with all fa€ts, 
all theories, all beliefs, This scientific method implies no new 
invention, but simply that truth must be sought with open 
mind, and that it must be followed fearlessly whithersoever it 
may lead, even though the path lie directly across the oldest 
traditions. The day when thinking men are willing to yield 


EVOLUTION AND RELIGION 55 


their intellectual sincerity in obedience to authority or to 
tradition has gone by. 

Under the leadership of this spirit scientific men have come 
into a faith concerning man and the universe in which he lives, 
not so precise or so detailed as the faith of tradition, but none 
the less a faith comforting and reassuring to a sincere mind. 
Behind all phenomena of a physical universe infinite in extent, . 
whose existence goes back to a time limitless in duration, the 
man of science recognizes an infinite and eternal power, the 
author and sustainer of the universe, in whom we live and 
_move and have our being. This universe he sees to be a universe 
of laws, although we are not always able to disentangle the 
expression of these laws from the complicated phenomena 
which their interaction brings about. The man of science rests 
secure in the faith that he lives in a universe sustained by an 
infinite power whose laws make for righteousness and progress. 
Such a man looks, therefore, hopefully and confidently not 
only upon the physical processes of nature but upon the prog- 
ress of his own race. Rising out of a brute ancestry, he sees the 
race growing century by century in intelligence and moral 
power. He has faith, therefore, that He who through millions » 
of years has brought us up—it may be slowly, painfully— 
will lead us gradually into a stronger, nobler life in this world. 
Science has faith in God and in human progress. 















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THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 


EDWARD G. SPAULDING 


Professor of Philosophy in Princeton University. 
Author of ‘‘The New Rationalism.’’ Lecturer at the 
Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. — 


CHAPTER IV 
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 
EDWARD G. SPAULDING 


WHETHER one likes it or not, one has to admit that 
this age is in its thought preéminently scientific. If 
there is one characteristic that dominates our thinking 
at the present time it is science. Not all the periods of 
civilization have been scientific, as we all know. Science 
is relatively a modern thing, much younger than reli- 
gion, much younger than theology. 

Modern psychology claims to be a science, and 
although it is not as advanced as many other sciences, 
for example, mathematics and mechanics, it neverthe- 
less does make good its claim. If, then, we are to take 
up the subject of the psychology of religion, this means 
that we are to look at religion from a scientific point 
of view, and that this special science, the psychology 
of religion, must be recognized as sharing the common 
characteristics of other sciences. There are many such 
common characteristics of science. Among the more 
important of these is the impersonal, unprejudiced, un- 
biased point of view—that point of view which means 
that one really does not prefer any one result to an- 
other as the outcome of investigation. If one remains 
true to this scientific point of view, as I conceive it, 
and studies the psychology of religion, then one would 
be as ready, for example, to acknowledge that all reli- 
gion is superstition as to acknowledge the opposite— 
provided this were the conclusion to which the scientific 


60 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


study of religious phenomena led. The sciences en- 
deavor to describe, to explain, and to learn specific 
relations of cause and effect, whereby in certain in- 
stances men can set up specific causes in order to get 
the specific effects they desire. | 

But if psychology is a science and shares with the 
other sciences such common characteristics, it is also 
distinct from the other sciences. It is different in that, 
as defined by William James, it studies consciousness 
as such. As defined by the modern behaviorist, Dr. 
Watson, it is the science of behavior—behavior being 
defined as what a living organism does when it is stimu- 
lated. Psychology, then, both shares the common char- 
acteristics of the other sciences, and yet is distinct 
from them, so that in the very special branch of the 
psychology of religion we must study either a very 
special kind of human consciousness or a very special 
kind of human behavior. My subject does not, however, 
commit me to the study exclusively of the psychology 
of the Christian religion. I shall discuss the psychology 
of religion in general. 

Within the field of the sciences, one may approach 
problems either from the evolutionary point of view or 
from what is rather technically called the ‘‘factual’’ 
point of view; in other words, one may study things as 
they have developed or evolved, or one may examine 
and investigate things as one finds them at the present 
time. There is no doubt that evolution has come to stay, 
and that the general idea of evolution has already had 
the widest influence in every branch of knowledge. In- 
deed, the study of almost every subject is incomplete 
unless one pursues it, at least in part, from the evolu- 
tionary point of view. I shall adopt both points of view, 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 61 


the evolutionary and the factual, in what I have to 
present. 

One of the first things to note in taking up the prob- 
lem of the psychology of religion is the wide extent of 
the field. There is the psychology of prayer, of conver- 
sion, of revelation, or of ritual. I shall not select any 
of these special topics but rather consider that which I 
think is a very central phase of the psychology of reli- 
gion, the belief in a Divine Being. But I also, as I ana- 
lyze my subject, have to distinguish and keep separate 
_ religion in a rather narrow sense of the term, theology, 
morals, and the Church. Religion is primary. There 
would have been no Church and no theology, had not 
man in his native make-up been religious, whatever the 
source and character of that primary religious con- 
sciousness may have been. 

I tentatively define religion, as distinct from theol- 
ogy, morals, and the Church, as a ‘‘tendency to reac- 
tion,’’ by which I mean that there is something poten- 
tial in human beings which prepares them to react in 
certain ways under certain circumstances. Or, to give 
another definition, religion is the conviction that there 
are in the general make-up of the universe one or more 
beings who determine men’s destiny and who therefore 
bear a personal relation to men. In contrast with reli- 
gion as thus defined, theologies are reasoned theories 
as to the nature of divine beings. Such theories are 
always influenced by the contemporaneous philosophy, 
science, and literature of the time in which any specific 
theology is developed. The Church in turn is an organi- 
zation and an institution based on and incorporating in 
itself a specific theology and furthering the religious 
consciousness in individuals. Finally, morals may be 


62 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


defined as a code of conduct. While I do not deny that 
between these four there are the closest relations, 
nevertheless I should say, in reference to certain ques- 
tions that have arisen in the United States within the 
last two or three years, that the conflict which some 
people think they discern is a conflict between science 
and special theologies, and not between science and 
religion. | 

The further examination of my problem shows me 
that, from the specifically psychological side, there are 
two points of view to be kept distinct. On the one hand 
I must consider the individual, since a religious con- 
sciousness and a religious attitude of mind is always in 
some individual living human being. But, on the other 
hand, there is also society, the crowd, the group, the 
congregation. The individual is made up of two classes 
of characteristics, those that are inherited, and those 
that are acquired. But immediately, again, I lave to 
distinguish between two kinds of inherited character- 
istics, the one kind consisting of those that each one of 
us has inherited physiologically and mentally from our 
parents as they, in turn, inherited such characteristics 
from their parents, and the other kind consisting of 
those characteristics that come to us from society, not 
directly in the process of birth, but by instruction, 
imitation, and suggestion. 

The individual is born with the ability to have sensa- . 
tions, to learn, to retain and to recall experiences, to 
perform certain instinctive acts, and to respond to sug- 
gestion. These abilities are, however, blank capacities. 
They are later filled in with a specific content, which, 
while the individual acquires it for himself, is never- 
theless determined for him by tradition and the social 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 63 


environment into which he is born. Tradition, then, is 
that specific means of inheritance whereby at the pres- 
ent we are connected with the past,—indeed, with the 
more remote ages going indefinitely far into antiquity. 

But the individual is not only an aggregate of charac- 
teristics which are inherited either from parents or 
from society; he is also shown by modern psychology 
to have both a consciousness and a subconsciousness. 

There are various theories of ‘‘the subconscious.’’ 
One theory identifies ‘‘the subconscious’’ wholly with 
that to which we are not attentive. Another theory, that 
of Dr. Morton Prince, states that subconsciousness is a 
co-consciousness existing side by side with our waking 
consciousness. A third theory makes the subconscious 
a lower degree or intensity of our waking conscious- 
ness, but continuous with it. Yet whatever hypothesis 
of the subconscious one may accept, all the evidence 
goes to show that the subconscious exists in some sense. 
It exists in the form of those past experiences that each 
of us has had, and has retained and can recall under 
certain conditions. For example, any person is not at 
any one time conscious of one-hundredth of the experi- 
ences of which he can be conscious. That of which he 
can be conscious and yet is not at a given moment con- 
scious of, is in his subconsciousness. But the subcon- 
sciousness is organized. It is not the mere sum or ag- 
gregate of past experiences, but an organization around 
certain ‘‘centers.’’ Thus there arise ‘‘complexes’’ or 
‘‘mechanisms’’ with which there are connected certain 
primitive emotions such as anger or fear. Accordingly, 
these complexes or mechanisms are regarded by some 
of the psychoanalysts, especially by those who follow 


64 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


that very influential psychologist, Freud, as always 
identical with a wish or a desire which brooks no defeat. 

Among the more important complexes is the ‘‘ego- 
complex,’’ and growing out of this there are certain 
specific reactions which some writers on the psychology 
of religion regard as most important. Among these 
specific mechanisms or reactions are the following 
three: ‘‘the defense mechanism,’’ ‘‘the compensation 
mechanism,’’ and ‘‘the escape mechanism.’’ As an illus- 
tration of the ‘‘compensation mechanism,’’ the psycho- 
analyst of the present day cites the dreams of sleep and 
what we call daydreams. Hach of these is the realiza- 
tion, often in symbolic form, of some desire or wish 
that is not gratified in, and that is perhaps suppressed 
during, waking consciousness. The ‘‘defense mechan- 
ism’’ may be defined as some kind of a device, often in 
very elaborate form, for the protection of one’s ego, 
or of one’s self-esteem. This may be illustrated by the 
case of a schoolboy who, being somewhat of a brag, has 
the conceit taken out of him by a sound thrashing, and 
who then, instead of bragging about himself, brags 
about his country or the United States Army. He 
thereby defends his ego from being injured. 

The individual, then, is made up of two groups of 
characteristics, those that are inherited and those that 
are acquired. There is also in us a consciousness and a 
subconsciousness. However, those characteristics that 
are inherited, those that are acquired, consciousness 
and subconsciousness, are all organized into a unity 
that is the ‘‘personality.’’ Personality is the result of, 
or is, indeed, identical with, this organization. 

Into the individual, tradition may be said to enter 
through the fact that he is taught by his parents, by his 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 65 


teachers, and by his elders. The tradition is continued 
from one generation to the next and the individual 
receives it and is ‘‘made”’ by it, in part. But, also, the 
individual imitates his parents and those about him, 
and, finally, the individual is suggestible. Tradition 
thus pours into his subconsciousness, subsequently to 
well up into, or to produce its effects on, his conscious- 
ness. 

Tradition is itself, however, very largely what the 
modern psychologists call a ‘‘crowd’’ phenomenon. 
Crowd psychology may be said to exist in two ‘‘dimen- 
sions,’’? the one ‘‘dimension’’ being the immediate 
cross section of the crowd at the present time, and the 
other dimension going back into the past. In other 
words, history, with its traditions, is very largely a 
matter of what we call crowd psychology. Accordingly 
we must ask: What are some of the more important 
characteristics of the crowd? In answer we must say 
that individuals of a crowd, as opposed, for example, 
to an individual thinking by himself in his study, are 
always highly suggestible and imitative. Secondly, the 
individuals of a crowd are always very conservative in 
comparison to the individual, and oftentimes they are 
attached to something which they regard as sacred, 
this sacredness itself being very largely a product of 
the social group to which the individuals belong. Also, 
the crowd is very intolerant of all opposing opinions. 
There is further, in the crowd, a predominance of emo- 
tion as opposed to reason, and almost a total absence 
of inhibitions. Finally, the members of the crowd are 
like-minded, tending to think in very much the same way 
and to give attention to but one or to but few ideas. 

Among the traditions which the individual inherits 


66 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


is the religious tradition. Thus I may say that the reli- 
gion of any person has to a very large extent been 
determined, not by himself, but by the fact that he was 
born perhaps in a particular nation and into a particu- 
lar social heritage. In other words, our religion has 
never been a matter of our free choice, but is something 
that is given to us and determined for us. 

This means, as Professor Robinson has pointed out 
in The Mind in the Making, that our minds are really 
to avery large extent, if not completely, ‘‘made.’’ They 
are ‘‘made,’’ on the one hand, by that which each one 
of us inherited as regards ‘‘mental’’ abilities and ca- 
pacities from our parents, and, on the other hand, by 
the traditions that have poured into these blank capaci- 
ties. That would seem to me to mean, then, whether one 
likes it or not, that one’s personality, one’s character, 
and the content of one’s mind and character, are pre- 
determined in a remorseless train of causes and effects, 
unless there is ‘‘some way out.’’ And quite frankly, 
the only possible ways I can find of avoiding or limiting 
such a result are either, on the one hand, through sense 
experience, or, on the other hand, through reason. 

I find, then, with Professor Robinson, that the mind 
is ‘‘made’’ by a twofold inheritance unless one can 
escape that inheritance by reasoning out things, and 
by using the information which comes from sense ex- 
perience, as illustrated by the discoveries of science. 
But if the mind of the individual is the product of these 
two series of inheritances, and if there are, perhaps, 
very limited methods of escape from such inheritances, 
namely, by reason and by sensation, nevertheless, one 
must admit that individuals are not all alike in their 
religious temperament. 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 67 


Professor Pratt, in his book on The Religious Con- 
sciousness, finds that religious temperaments are of 
four types. One type emphasizes tradition, and, there- 
fore, ritual and the Church. There is a second type that 
prefers, as I would personally, to make religion com- 
patible with reason, showing perhaps in that way, by 
submitting reason to its own test, that reason is limited, 
and that there is, therefore, ample opportunity for 
some kind of experience other than rational experience. 
There is a third type, to which Professor Ames of the 
University of Chicago belongs, that identifies religion 
with ethics and morals. And, finally, there is the fourth 
type of individuals, who, balancing things and finding 
no great advantage on either side, make up their minds 
to believe. They have ‘‘the will to believe.”’ 

Now, I dare say that the great majority of the 
readers of this chapter belong to the first two types of 
individuals, namely, those who, on the one hand, have 
inherited their religion from the tradition in which 
they have been brought up, but who, on the other hand, 
are quite willing to submit that traditional, inherited 
religion to the test of reason; who are quite willing to 
compare religion, theology, and the Church with the 
claims and criticism of science, and adjudicate the con- 
flict. Wherever there are these two motives, there is, 
however, always the possibility of conflict, and if there 
is conflict, it must be resolved. But to resolve the con- 
flict means that one must, perhaps, pull out of his sub- 
consciousness into his consciousness those mechanisms 
that actuate him in what he believes in order that they 
may be submitted to the examination and test of reason 
in the light of as many facts as possible. 

There is another branch of the psychology of reli- 


68 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


gion to which at this point I would call attention. This 
concerns the question of the origin of religion. This 
problem is a difficult one because, perhaps, no one at 
the present time can find religion originating. Never- 
theless, there are many data that give us much infor- 
mation on the question. These data indicate that there 
are possible a number of different origins of religion. 
Most of these origins have to do with certain instincts 
and primitive emotions, prominent among which is 
fear. Ribot and MacDougall think that religion origi- 
nated in this way. What I wish to point out, however, in 
connection with this hypothesis, is that, if fear may be 
characterized as the primary religious experience, then 
out of this experience, at least according to some psy- 
chologists, there arose a ‘‘compensating mechanism,’’ 
or a ‘‘defense reaction’’ that is religion. Thus, if fear 
was the original source of religion, not necessarily of 
Christianity, but of any religion whatever, there would 
be, as a specific reaction to that fear, a ‘‘defense 
mechanism”’ such as the belief in, and propitiation of, 
a Being who would be regarded as the means whereby 
one could escape from that which one fears. 
Schleiermacher, on the other hand, supposed that 
all religion originated in a feeling of dependence, which 
would include, perhaps, what we call humility. But if 
this feeling was the original religious experience, then 
there may be said to arise out of it the specific ‘‘de- 
fense reaction,’’ or the ‘‘compensating reaction,’ of 
conceiving and believing in One upon whom one is _ 
dependent, and in whom one ¢an find the source of the 
greatness, the infinity, and the sublimity of things. 
Hope has also been suggested as the primary religious 
experience out of which religion has grown, and in this 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 69 


case there will arise the reaction of believing in a Being 
in whom one can hope and trust. Sympathy is likewise 
supposed to be one characteristic of the religious ex- 
perience. Accordingly there will be the reaction of 
believing in One who responds, who loves. In the case 
of suffering, which oftentimes does lead people to have 
a religion, the reaction is the belief in a Great Allevia- 
tor. The impulse to self-preservation, or the ‘‘ego 
mechanism’’ itself, may lead to the specific ‘‘defense’’ 
or ‘‘compensation mechanism”? of the belief in immor- 
tality ; for the belief in immortality is a means whereby 
one defends oneself against the dislike of total destruc- 
tion. 

There are, then, these possible psychological origins 
of religion, or characteristics of the primary religious 
experience. Yet, in these various possible origins or 
characteristics of the religious experience, and of the 
reactions or beliefs to which they lead, there are certain 
common factors. The first of these is that every reli- 
gious experience—I am making a distinction between 
religious experience and religious faith—leads to reli- 
gious faith and belief. As a result of religious experi- 
ence, men imagine and conceive, just as, because of 
certain experiences, desires, and wishes, they dream. 
This means that the evidence is that religion origi- 
nated, in part at least, in imagination, with men unable 
to distinguish between what they imagined and what 
they perceived. The second common factor is that, in all 
of the reactions to these primary religious experiences, 
men hold to the reality and the objective character of 
that to which they direct their belief. 

The third common factor is that every one of these 
reactions means that the individual holds to the real 


70 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


existence of something that is of value to him, of some- 
thing that tends to make things better or even to make 
them good. 

In the development of religion, both the Christian 
religion and other religions, all of these factors un- 
doubtedly played their part, and, accordingly, a specific 
religious tradition has in each case developed which 
has always been to a very large extent a social phe- 
nomenon. 

With such origins and with the fact of tradition, then, 
both admitted, I am forced to the conclusion that all of 
these original motives persist, and actually enter, to a 
less or greater degree, the mind of the individual who 
inherits his religion from the tradition in which he is 
brought up. In other words, I am compelled to conclude 
that the individual’s religion is determined for him, 
unless he reasons. For it is only by reason that one can 
get a basis for religion that is independent of the tradi- 
tion. 

But this is not the whole story. In philosophy, at the 
present time, there are two positions with reference to 
the question of truth. One is that the actual develop- 
ment or history or evolution of an idea or theory makes 
that idea or theory true; in other words, it is main- 
tained that genesis makes truth. For example, the ques- 
tion might be asked, with reference to legal principles, 
whether there is anything more to the so-called validity 
or truth of such principles than the fact that these 
principles have had a history and have worked success- 
fully in human society to a greater or less degree. Op- 
posed to this is the position that the truth or validity of 
a law or principle is quite independent of its history 
and development. The great majority of scientists tend 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 71 


to take this second position with reference to their 
science. Thus it would be said that, for example, the 
theory of Einstein is true, not because it has been pre- 
ceded by other theories in the history of astronomy and 
now ‘‘works better’’ than its predecessors, but because 
at the present time certain facts are known that can 
only be explained on the basis of that theory. So we 
have the two positions, the one that genesis makes a 
‘thing’? true, and the other that truth is independent 
of genesis and history. 

Now, although I cannot go into this question in detail, 
and can only express my own credo, I am personally 
of the conviction that the truth of anything is indepen- 
dent of its history, and accordingly that anything is 
true because it stands the tests on the one hand, of fact, 
and, on the other hand, of reason, or in a great many 
cases because it stands both of these tests. 

Applying this position to the subject of the psychol- 
ogy of religion as I have treated it up to the present 
time, I find that, although the religious consciousness 
has had a development and a history, although in that 
development there has appeared Church and theology, 
and although the primitive sources of religion un- 
doubtedly have persisted and enter the mind of each 
individual, nevertheless, at the present time, we can ask 
the question—quite fearlessly—whether religion can 
be justified in the face of all the facts that science 
advances. 

My answer to this question is yes. But the further 
problem is how would this answer be justified. The 
way that I arrive at it myself is by examining the pos- 
sible origins as well as the later characteristics of reli- 
gion, and by finding in all of these the factor of value, 


72 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


of something that is of worth to the individual, or of 
something that means to him betterment and goodness. 
It is just this common factor that is present both in all 
of the possible origins of religion and in all the later 
developments, even, for example, in such a possible 
discussion as to whether one shall believe in a per- 
sonal God or not. For, if one does believe in a personal 
God, then philosophically, logically, and psychologi- 
cally, the reason why one so believes is because one 
finds that personality is better or higher in its presence 
than its absence; or if one believes in a Divine Being 
who is even above personality, that is, who is supra- 
personal, then the reason why one thus believes is be- 
cause one conceives such a Being to be higher than or 
better than a personal Divine Being. 

Briefly, I find that science does not exhaust all the 
realities of life, but that we live not only in the presence 
of the realities of science, but also by love, charity, and 
justice, although I grant that there is not as much of 
these in life as I wish there were. Value or worth, to 
give a definition, is the common property or basis of 
comparison by virtue of which facts of experience can 
be said to be good, better, or best. Or, to state this in 
another way, in so far as I find that I do not and cannot 
say that one thing is heavier than another, or longer 
than another, or more costly than another, but that I 
can say that it is better than another, I am presuppos- 
ing that there is, in this world in which I live, some- 
thing of worth or value. That which is of worth or value , 
may be an end in itself, or it may be merely a means to 
something else that is an ultimate end. 

I can, then, in analyzing the psychology of religion, 
distinguish two things, namely, religious experience 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 73 


and religious faith. In religious experience we have 
fear, the feeling of dependence, hope, and the like, that 
are not identical with religious faith. There is also the 
experience of that which is good, of that which is of 
worth. However, that which is good or is of worth may 
be experienced as in conflict with evil. But the experi- 
ence of such conflict leads to confidence and trust that, 
although the good in things may have opposition, it 
will nevertheless prevail. This is religious faith. 

Accordingly, my definition of religion, not merely of 
Christianity, but of any religion whatever—for I firmly 
believe that other religions than Christianity have their 
truth also—is as follows: Religion is the experience of 
and faith in the presence in this universe of a prin- 
ciple of and power for goodness, between which and 
myself there is a very intimate relation. This principle 
is not material, not physical, and therefore it is not of 
the nature of those things with which the natural 
sciences deal. It is immaterial and spiritual. For the 
one characteristic that constitutes the nature of the 
spiritual is goodness. Indeed, goodness rather than con- 
sciousness, is, to my way of thinking, the fundamental 
characteristic of what I mean by the spiritual. 

It is as if the world consisted of two kinds of reality. 
The one kind is dealt with by science, is measured and 
counted and weighed, and is, therefore, quantitative, 
while the other kind is not measured, but comes under 
the caption of ‘‘the good,’’ and, in certain cases, the 
beautiful. The scientist seems to many to attack the 
existence of such a reality in our universe, but I think 
that an analysis of science will show that there is no 
difficulty in accepting such a scheme of things. Profes- 
sor Russell, astronomer at Princeton, has stated that 


74 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


the nature of the mechanical sciences, from which so 
much opposition to religion is supposed to come, is very 
much misinterpreted. He illustrated the point by the 
example of the steam engine, in the cylinder of which ~ 
the molecules of steam strike the piston head and exert 
pressure. Mechanical scientists sometimes interpret 
this to mean that the only realities that are present are 
the little particles of water which go back and forth 
with tremendous velocity and strike the piston head. 
Professor Russell repudiated this interpretation, and 
made the point that the pressure is just as real as the 
particles of water. To speak of the motion of these 
particles is, he insisted, only an hypothesis that is made 
in order to explain the pressure. In the case of human 
personality, although psychologists and physiologists 
can regard human beings as made up of atoms and 
molecules, of reflexes and instincts, and of subcon- 
sciousness and consciousness, there is also always a 
higher reality that is the personality. This peculiar 
reality belongs, now, to the realm of what I call worths 
or values. 

Another point which Professor Russell has talked 
over with me in conversations that we have had con- 
cerning some recent scientific theories is that no science 
can get along merely by collecting sense data in the 
laboratory, but that every science sooner or later be- 
comes a reasoned doctrine, and that it can become this 
only because of the presence in nature of something 
that is not material. In other words, there are imma- . 
terial relations among the physical or material facts 
with which science deals. Now, if one did not go any 
farther, this fact alone would indicate that there is the 
possibility of there being in the universe, in addition 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 75 


to the material facts with which the natural sciences 
deal, certain immaterial realities. Those immaterial 
entities need not, of course, be identical with what I 
have called ‘‘goodness’’ or ‘‘value,’’ but if there are 
some immaterial entities, there may be others. So it is 
a question of fact as to whether or not we experience 
those other immaterial realities. 

My answer is that we do. To me the world presents 
itself as a struggle between two factors, the one, the 
good, the other, evil; and my religious belief and faith 
consist in the fact that, although I cannot prove, I 
nevertheless am convinced, that the good will win out. 
It may be that the modern psychologist is right when 
he says to me, ‘‘ That on your part is simply a ‘defense 
reaction’; you are simply trying to rationalize that 
which you prefer to be true.’’ However, the reply which 
I make to him is this, that I can study science as well as 
can he, that psychology is not alone to be considered in 
studying the problem, and that although there are un- 
doubtedly psychological origins of religion, neverthe- 
less these origins of religion are not its justification. 
The justification of religion lies in the fact that values 
are experienced, are as real as material facts. For 
example, I experience the beauty of a picture just as 
much as I experience the chemical constitution of its 
pigments. | 

In the general realm of values, however, I discover 
two kinds, the one positive, and the other negative; the 
one identical with good, and the other identical with 
evil. The question then arises, How should we deal with 
this problem of evil? In reply one must admit that there 
are various ways in which this problem has been an- 
swered in the past. One way is to take the position that 


76 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


we live in a world of mere appearances, and that behind 
that world there is a realm of reality. Evil can then be 
assigned to the realm of mere appearances. Another 
way is to maintain that evil is a means to an end. Still 
a third way makes evil an offset to the good, with the 
claim that there could be no such thing as good if there 
were not its opposite, evil. 

With these different possible solutions of the prob- 
lem, I am, however, not wholly in agreement. The 
scheme of things which I find I am forced to accept 
when I work out my own philosophy of religion is, that 
the Divine Being is not a creator, an architect, or a 
mechanist, in the sense of having started something 
going that has been going ever since. Nor is He a Being 
who reveals Himself to human beings, then to remain 

apart; but He is identical with the fact in the universe 
of goodness or of worth. 

I admit that religious beliefs in their origins are 
largely identical with what the modern psychologist 
calls ‘‘compensation mechanisms,’’ or ‘‘escape reac- 
tions,’’ and that these mechanisms are the product of 
imagination and emotion. In the development of reli- 
gion these ‘‘imaginings’’ are reasoned out in connec- 
tion with certain ideas, so that the original emotions 
become highly idealized sentiments. A further ‘‘reason- 
ing out’’ gives theological systems, and, as these theo- 
logical systems are formed, specific ecclesiastical and 
religious traditions arise. 

Hach one of us socially inherits some one of these 
traditions. But the religion which one inherits socially 
is always open to examination by reason, and by criti- 
cism from the standpoint of science and from the ex- 
amination of all the facts. Submitted, however, to such 


THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RELIGION 77 


criticism, religion stands the test, although it may be 
that any specific system of theology may not have this 
good fortune. If this is the case it indicates that the 
fundamental thing in the question is, not theology, not 
the Church, but religion when this is defined as the 
acceptance in the universe of the presence of values or 
worths. 

But it is also a psychological fact that individuals 
differ. There are the four temperaments to which I 
have referred, the rational, the ethical, the traditional, 
and the voluntaristic, the latter characterized by that 
which William James has called ‘‘the will to believe.”’ 
With individuals thus differing, one cannot but con- 
clude that creeds must also differ, as must theologies, 
and it is intolerance for one to maintain that there can 
be only one creed to which all should or could subscribe. 

The Church is that institution which historically 
has maintained that there are in the universe values or 
worths. It is also that institution which historically has 
stood for the fight of evil by good. It is, accordingly, 
good psychology, in my opinion, as well as good ethies, 
to ally one’s self with the Church. 









) ie 


THE FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS OF 
CHRISTIANITY 


ALBERT P. FITCH 


Preacher, lecturer. Formerly Professor i Amherst 
College. Sometime Dean of Andover Theological Semi- 
nary. Author of ‘‘Can the Church Survive im the 
Changing Order?” and ‘‘Preaching and Paganism.’ 





CHAPTER V 


THE FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS OF 
CHRISTIANITY 


ALBERT P. FITCH 


I THINK we would best begin by delimiting our sub- 
ject. ‘‘Christianity,’’ as we call it, is nearly two thou- 
_ sand years old. Like all venerable institutions, it is 
a rich complex; it has gathered a variety of oddly 
assorted associations with the passing years, absorbed 
many semiunrelated, mutually inconsistent ideas, ritu- 
als, and, even, practices. Indeed, with our present 
knowledge of its origins, Semitic, Hellenic, pagan, and 
of its evolution from these sources, in which, from 
time to time, it has conquered rival faiths by in large 
part absorbing them within its own movement, it is 
no longer possible to use accurately such a term as 
‘*Christianity,’’ if we mean by that a clearly defined, 
self-consistent, and essentially unchanging body of 
belief. There is an important sense in which it is not 
true that there is any such thing as ‘‘the faith once 
delivered to the saints,’’ although I hope to show, later, 
that there is another important sense in which that 
phrase is true. 

One can speak of the Christian tradition, perhaps; 
and of the Christian spirit, certainly. But so far as 
there is any common denominator of the immense 
politico-ecclesiastical institution which we call the 
Church, and of the amorphous body of doctrine, primi- 
tive, Roman, Greek, Protestant, which all goes under 


82 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


the name of Christian, it is not found in a few intellec- 
tual convictions regarded as essential by all of them. 
It is found rather in a common emotion or spirit which 
runs, in varying strengths, through them all, and which, 
by its power, holds them more or less together. We 
discard, then, any discussion of common theological 
belief, since we should find small agreement here. The 
Greek Church would place first the Incarnation; the 
Roman Church, the Atonement; the Protestant Church 
of the moment, a variety of doctrines, chiefly, perhaps, 
Man, who is the candle of the Lord, the son of Man who 
stands upon His feet before divine Majesty. 

Moreover, the classic doctrines of the Church not 
only have no universal acceptance, either as to the 
order of their importance or as to the precise nature 
of their content, but they are for the most part formu- 
lated in the ideology of an outmoded view of the world, 
and addressed in their practical application to the 
needs and defects of vanished orders of society. Thus, 
most men do not think, to-day, in terms of a dichoto- 
mized universe; we do not accept, either in philosophy 
or psychology, a fundamental dualism dividing the 
cosmos. Nor in our applications of beliefs ought we to 
address them to the problems of an ecclesiastical, a 
feudal, or an agricultural order of society, although it 
is in the terms of these vanished or vanishing orders 
that, for the most part, they are conceived of in their 
practical bearings. The initial mistake, then, would be 
to look for the fundamental beliefs of Christianity 
in any possible combination or selection of inherited 
theological statements. 

But I said a moment ago that the one thing common 
to the ‘‘Christian’’? movement was a certain moral faith 


FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS 83 


or spirit which has so vitalized its differing ecclesias- 
tical institutions and its rival creedal formulations that 
they have all served as the actual vehicles of the reli- 
gion of Jesus. That spirit has been their solvent and 
has even carried effectively an ever increasing eccle- 
siastical and theological impedimenta, drawn from ever 
widening and more varied sources. Our question, then, 
might be, What is this one thing which the whole Chris- 
tian movement has in varying degrees held in common, 
which thing we call the Christian spirit or the Christian 
power? And what are the elements which compose it? 

I think the first element in the Christian power is 
that it is summed up in terms of a person. There are 
some brilliant New Testament scholars, Mr. Kirsopp 
Lake in particular, who think we have overestimated 
the part played by the person of Jesus in primitive 
Christianity. The Pauline epistles seem to me to speak 
differently. Let us say then that the fundamental belief 
of the Christian is faith in the complete truth of a per- 
son, that Jesus, as the truth, is the heart of the Chris- 
tian movement. But having made that statement, we 
ought carefully to guard and define it. Jesus was a man 
tempted at all points like as we are, molded by His 
social environment, even as we are, subject to the physi- 
cal, the intellectual, limitations of His age. In what 
sense can we say that all Christians believe, then, that 
they have found the truth in the person of Jesus? 

Not in the historical sense. It is not essential to 
Christianity to see Him as the incarnation of historical 
truth. That is to say, it is beside the point whether 
every statement regarding external events, whether 
made by Him, or about Him, corresponds with fact. 
The infancy narratives, the dogma of the virgin birth, 


84 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


the resurrection story, may or may not be true. This is 
a question of factual evidence and not in it resides the 
secret of the Christian power. Nor is it essential to 
Christianity to regard Him as an incarnation of scien- 
tific truth. That is, it is beside the point whether or not 
all His ideas corresponded with reality. He appears to 
have believed that physical and mental disturbances 
were the result of demoniac possession, to have be- 
lieved in a theory of the nature of the universe which 
before the days of Copernicus was generally accepted. 
These ideas may or may not have been true. That is a 
question of scientific investigation, and neither in belief 
nor disbelief in them is found the secret of the Chris- 
tian power. 

But I suppose the test comes when we say that all 
Christians believe in Jesus as the personification of 
moral and religious truth; that is, as one who found 
and lived truth in all His personal relationships. We 
get in Him the impression of a perfect correspondence 
between speech and thought, outward expression and 
inward conviction. In Him we find harmony of relation- 
ships, all that He ought to be in dealing with other peo- 
ple, whether as a son, a citizen, a friend, a social leader, 
a spiritual seer. We find in Him an essentially unbroken 
consciousness of the Divine Presence, and a perfectly 
achieved harmony with the Divine Will. It is that utter 
moral integrity which subdued His disciples to awe, 
and the record of which their followers transmitted in 
the Gospel, and which an elder world called, in theologi- ° 
cal terms, His sinlessness. In short, the first thing com- 
mon to all Christians is that they have a personal 
leader whom they believe to have been an absolutely 


FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS 85 


true person. And perhaps for mankind, truth, in the 
terms of a person, is the highest form of it. 

Now if the heart of the Christian power is this sort 
of belief in Jesus, we can retrace our steps for a mo- 
ment and again clear the ground of many misconcep- 
tions of what both its friends and its foes sometimes 
say 1s essential to Christianity. It is not fundamental 
to being a Christian to subscribe, or fail to subscribe, 
to any metaphysical speculation as to the divine or 
human nature of Jesus, or any metaphysical specu- 
lation as to the nature of God. It is not belief in a third 
person in a Trinity, or in a miracle-working prodigy, 
which has ever been the true and constant source of 
Christian power or is essential to Christianity, al- 
though it is often identified with these things. It is 
not fundamental to being a Christian that we should 
either accept, or refuse to accept, Jesus’ world view, 
whatever it was, within which He worked out and for- 
mulated His message and lived His life. Let us assume, 
because at the moment the better part of New Testa- 
ment scholarship does assume it, that He moved in the 
circle of the ideas of His Semitic inheritance. Let us 
say: The notion of development, of growth of the new 
out of existing organizations, was impossible to a man 
of His time and place. The idea, in other words, of the 
evolution of a new society was antecedently out of the 
question for Him. It did not exist, even in embryo, in 
His part of the ancient world. Hence ‘‘progress,’’ as we 
understand the term, meant nothing to Him. Progress 
to Him was catastrophic change, a wiping of the slate 
clean, and the beginning over again of a new order. Let 
us say that He believed that there was about to appear 
another and a completed society, differing in kind from 


86 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


the then existing one, a holy city, anew Jerusalem, soon 
to descend from God out of heaven, and that He was 
the herald and would be the witness of it, returning 
again in glory on the clouds of heaven. In this belief, if 
He held it, He was disappointed; the new kingdom did 
not come; the evil custom of this world had its age-long 
way with Him; and, as regards these things, He died a 
disillusioned and anguished man. 

All this may or may not be true. Personally, I think 
for substance, with some modifications, it probably is 
true. But again it is beside the point. It is not funda- 
mental to believing in Jesus to enquire whether He did 
or did not know what history had in store, whether He 
read the movements of His time aright. For belief in 
Jesus as the personification of moral truth stands or 
falls with the intrinsic worth of what He taught or was 
in that realm, with what He believed and exemplified 
regarding human and divine relationships, irrespective 
of what were the occasions of that teaching or toward 
what immediate external ends, He thought it was 
moving. 

Now we can begin to speak constructively. What is 
the first fundamental in the spirit of Christianity? 

I. Belief in the ethical and religious supremacy of 
Jesus. The sign of the Christian is moral discipleship 
because the Christian power has been moral power, and 
the Christian spirit springs from moral allegiance. 
What Christianity means then by ‘‘faith’’ is moral 
trust. Faith in Jesus is believing what He said regard- , 
ing the moral and religious nature of God and man. 
Faith in Him is confidence in that message, trust in His 
moral understanding, faith in His spiritual vision. 
What is fundamental to discipleship is the active loy- 


FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS 87 


alty of the will to His way of living and to His prin- 
ciples of conduct. 

This includes, not as its beginning but as its consum- 
mation, His belief as to the character of God and adopt- 
ing the appropriate attitude of man toward a Deity of 
such a character. So far as one can distinguish between 
two things that are interdependent, belief in Jesus 
would put as the beginning of discipleship the moral, 
not the religious. First, because He seems to have 
_ achieved, as He certainly summed up, religious under- 
standing in and through ethical practice. Blessed are 
the pure in heart for they shall see God. It is character 
which brings insight, not insight which must be pre- 
supposed for character. So the first step in belief is 
doing as He did, believing in Him by imitating Him. 
They who will to do the will shall know of the doctrine. 
All over the world the Christian power has flowed from 
believing that what He said about the moral nature of 
God and man is true; what He did in His relationships 
with human spirits and with the Hternal Spirit was 
wise and right; what He condemned in such relation- 
ships is false. The principle of His life was right and I 
accept it. That is, I take it, the saving faith of Chris- 
tianity. 

We must not ignore the fact that this power and this 
saving trust have in large measure come down through 
the ages under the guise of a Divine Redeemer, a God 
who lived and died, and rose again, and whose suprem- 
acy in the moral and religious world was certified to 
man by the miracles of His Incarnation, and Atone- 
ment, and Resurrection, rather than by His intrinsic 
moral excellence, and who was regarded as having 
brought his saving moral energy and spiritual grace as 


88 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


part of a predestined world plan for the salvation of 
mankind. But what I have been trying to say earlier 
is that this old mode of thinking, this antique interpre- 
tation of the power, this assumed apparatus for its 
transmission and exercise, is not fundamental. And 
certainly it is not the way in which men either accept, 
understand, or are filled by the power, for the most 
part, in our world of this moment. 

II. It becomes us then to enquire what is the content 
of this moral and religious teaching and practice of 
Jesus, the acceptance of which is the faith of the Chris- 
tian. We may indeed reject it on the ground that it was 
meant for the kind of a world that does not exist. If we 
so reject it, then we cannot call ourselves, in any sense 
that could be called a universal sense, Christians. Or 
we may accept it on the ground that it sets forth a 
principle which could be workable in our world and the 
one principle potent enough to overcome our world. If 
we thus accept it, primarily because it appeals to our 
best judgment, we become Christians of a sort, and a 
very noble sort. Or, if we accept it because Jesus Him- 
self, as we thus find and see Him, has utterly captured 
our moral will, our spiritual affections, our religious 
intuitions and imagination, and we are ready to follow 
Him to the world’s end, then we become Christians of 
another, a more potent, perhaps a more distinctively 
religious, sort. As to His teaching and example, in 
which we are to put our trust if we follow Him, He 
Himself did not believe that all men could or would 
accept it. Many would be called and few chosen; the 
way was strait and narrow and few would there be who 
would go in thereat. But He certainly gave the assur- 


FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS 89 


ance that all those who could and did accept His faith 
should overcome the world. Do we really believe that? 

III. Now as to the teaching. Here we must be careful 
not to fall into the language of religious sentimentalism. 
The emotion of the gospel is a moral, an orderly emo- 
tion, an emotion which connotes ethical discipline. It is 
not romantic and uncritical, as it is so often presented. 
Let us begin with Jesus’ teaching as to the nature and 
character of God. We find Him in that teaching re- 
_jecting the analogy of the physical world of power; 
doubtless unconscious of the analogy of metaphysical 
speculation; and using the familiar terms of the family 
relationships as the vehicles of His thought. One best 
senses what the character of the Infinite is like by sym- 
bolizing it under the human term of Father. No doubt 
other ethnic faiths have spoken of God as Father, but 
their Father-God has been a progenitor of a nation or 
a tribe and their brotherhood limited to racial lines. 
That is, they move on physical bases. Moreover, as 
these nations have progressed in culture the term Sov- 
ereign or Emperor has been substituted for Father. 
But in Christianity we find a reverse development ; 
Jesus comes at the end of a long historical process and 
uses the word Father constantly as it has never been 
used in any other religion. His is the only developed 
religion which uses Father as the sign, the constant 
appellation of Deity. The ethical, and hence universal, 
Fatherhood dimly shadowed forth by Amos and Hosea, 
He teaches ; a God who sendeth His rain on the just and 
on the unjust, and causes His sun to shine on the evil 
and on the good; a God who has an infinite care for men 
as His moral ‘‘children”’ so that the very hairs of their 
heads are all numbered. In this attributing to Deity the 


90 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


capacity and the will for infinite moral differentiation 
in His creatures is one of the most startling and origi- 
nal portions of the teaching of Jesus. No man, then, 
need ever be morally weak, for the Father desires to 
perfect that weakness in His strength. No man ever 
need be consumed with inward restlessness and discon- 
tent, for the Father waits to endow him with the abun- 
dance of His peace. No man need ever be morally shot 
to pieces and lost, because the Shepherd is always seek- 
ing His wandering sheep. No man need ever be dis- 
couraged by reason of the sins of his youth, for this is 
the Father who sees the prodigal coming a long way 
off and runs and falls on his neck and kisses him. But 
the gospel recognizes that many men will be weak; 
many are consumed with restlessness; many are lost; 
but there is no ultimate reason, outside of the mystery 
of the will of man, according to Jesus, why this should 
be so. | 

What then is the moral characteristic of the Father 
whom Jesus teaches? It is redemptive love, freely and 
supremely given, so that in the words of Jesus to the 
woman at the well, we know that God seeketh His true 
worshipers. It is redemptive love supremely exempli- 
fied in good will toward men, so that we see in the ex- 
ample of Jesus that He who knows that He comes from 
God and goes to God will, in His supreme moment of 
Godlikeness, gird Himself with a towel and wash His 
disciples’ feet. We perceive then the social and disci- 
plinary nature of the love of God as Jesus reveals it. » 
It is a love whose purpose is character, whose content 
is service, whose method is glad devotion, whose goal is 
racial redemption. It is not a lazy, indulgent fondness; 
it is not a romantic or sentimental emotion; but it is a 


FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS 91 


single-minded, educative, reformative, constructive 
love. The second element in the faith in Jesus is to 
accept this as man’s best understanding of the nature 
of Deity. 

Now this teaching is even more potently set forth in 
the conduct of Jesus than in His sayings. What He says 
is the character of God was His own character. Hence 
it follows, not as a matter of mystic vision, nor as a 
matter of philosophical speculation, but as a matter of 
experience, that the Christian conceives of the charac- 
ter of God in the terms of the character of Jesus, and 
when he is thinking of this aspect of divine life he says, 
in this realm, ‘‘God is like Jesus.’’ The dreadful mis- 
take which the historic Church has made has been to 
reverse that statement and thereby to render unintel- 
ligible the process, and to say ‘‘Jesus is like God,’’ 
thus taking some preconceived conception of Deity, 
almost invariably conceived in terms of an absolute 
philosophy, and trying to read that into the Lord Jesus. 
Any notion, of whatever sort, which endeavors to iden- 
tify Jesus with God, is religiously impious, intellec- 
tually indefensible, and ethically abhorrent. It would 
have been abhorrent to no one more than to Jesus Him- 
self. But back of the great Christologies does lie a truth 
which I should say was the third fundamental of Chris- 
tianity ; namely, that the world has one adequate and 
satisfying conception as to the moral nature of Deity, 
so far as mankind needs or is able to understand it, and 
that conception is summed up in the person of Jesus. 
We find and worship God, through Jesus. Do we be- 
lieve it? | 

IV. What then is, or should be, the universal belief 
as to what it means to be a disciple? It means to be a 


92 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


son and a brother in this kingdom, this divine family 
which Jesus preaches. And to be a son and a brother 
means to love our fellow men the way God loves us. 
That is to say, the attitude of the disciples of Jesus 
toward the human world is a loving, self-forgetful atti- 
tude, whose purpose is the making of Christian charac- 
ter, whose content is service, whose method is sacrifice, 
—if you mean by sacrifice glad and spontaneous devo- 
tion of all you have to the common good,—and whose 
goal is racial redemption. Thus we too serve men 
according to their need, not according to their desert. 
Thus we bless them that curse us, because an evil and 
a cursing heart needs blessing. Thus we pour out for 
men, and around them, an unexpected and undeserved 
affection, giving to the worst of them more than the 
best of them could ever have dreamed of, because the 
Father is more willing to hear than we to pray and has 
given us exceeding abundantly above all we could ask 
or think. Thus, to use the illustration of Jesus, when a 
man asks my coat I give him my cloak also, that he may 
know how my life reaches out toward him and that the 
only thing which limits my glad forth-giving to my 
neighbor is the extent of my perception of his need or 
the extent of his capacity to receive. The power comes 
when men live this way. Do we believe it? 

The fundamental beliefs of Christianity, then, are: 
Faith in the moral and religious supremacy of Jesus, 
in the terms of active loyalty of the will to His princi-’ 
ples, and standards of conduct, which loyalty finds its 
final sanction in the further faith, achieved through 
Him, that these principles and standards are of the 
esserice of the Eternal Being and that their exemplifi- 
cation in motive and conduct is the most acceptable 


FUNDAMENTAL BELIEFS 93 


worship which mankind may offer Him. What doth the 
Lord require of us but to do justly and to love mercy 
and thus to walk humbly with our God? 

Finally: The Christian power took its rise in a semi- 
military, semicommercial imperialism with its charac- 
teristic accompaniments of the chattel slavery of the 
greater portion of its inhabitants and the moral and 
intellectual disintegration of its privileged classes. The 
Christian power, no longer advantaged by its pristine 
_ freshness and simplicity but, rather, encumbered by 
ancient institutionalized forms and inherited philoso- 
phies, faces to-day, as it has for the most part, through- 
out its history, a similar situation. 

For, at this moment, the average man is beginning 
to discern that, behind the determining, as distin- 
guished from the apparent, forces of this civilization, 
there lies a commercial and financial imperialism, di- 
rected by small but powerful minorities, largely sup- 
ported by a sympathetic press, which uses the machin- 
ery of democracy to serve its own ends. The years 
between 1914 and 1923 have revealed the common 
springs of action of the professional soldier, politician, 
banker, captain of industry, ecclesiastic, in our present 
civilization. Allowing for numerous and occasionally 
notable exceptions, they accept, on the whole, the rule 
of force as the ultimate justification of conduct, with its 
accompanying materialism of faith and thought. And 
this rule of force has again the characteristic accom- 
paniment of the industrial bondage of large masses of 
the population, and the decay of political vision and 
moral energy in its governing classes. 

Yet the Christian spirit has persisted hitherto and 
the Christian power is not dead. In these two thousand 


94 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


years it has always mitigated, sometimes elevated and 
subdued, that imperialism and, from time to time, it has 
blossomed in luminous and self-verifying lives like 
Francis Xavier, Francis of Assisi, Father Damien, Wil- 
fred Grenfell. It has always been to the worldly-wise 
foolishness, and to the amiable materialist a stumbling- 
block. It has probably never been more needed than at 
this desperate moment in the history of Western civili- 
zation. That spirit of Jesus may perish from the earth. 
If it is to survive, as I, for one, have no slightest doubt 
that it will, it will be because it can still command the 
allegiance of youth, who possess both moral and intel- 
lectual integrity, in this and the coming generations. 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 


BENJAMIN W. BACON 


Professor of New Testament Criticism and Interpreta- ed 
tion, Yale Divinity School. Author of ‘‘Introduction to 
the New Testament’’ and ‘‘ Jesus and Paul.’”? | 





CHAPTER VI 
THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 
BENJAMIN W. BACON 


ONE of Moliére’s most amusing characters, on learn- 
ing the distinction between poetry and prose, exclaims 
with great satisfaction at his own unexpected profi- 
_ ciency, ‘‘Why, I have been talking prose all my life 
without knowing it.’’ I dislike to suggest that there is 
anything prosaic about theology, but I imagine that 
there are many of us who have similar unsuspected 
resources of culture. We have been talking theology all 
our lives without knowing it. We merely put our ideas 
about religion into terms of logic and common sense, 
and there it was, theology in spite of us. 

In spite of us, I say, for until very recently, at least, 
it had been the fashion to decry theology. Religion? 
Yes; men believed in religion. Or if not, they tolerated 
it on the ground that ‘‘Man is incurably religious’? and 
you may as well put up with what you can’t help. Some 
regarded this instinct for religion as a misfortune 
superior persons must make the best of in their less 
enlightened neighbors. Others looked upon it as lifting 
humanity a little above the brutes, because you can 
have morality among animals, vicious horses and 
kindly ones, friendly elephants and man-killers. But we 
have yet to hear of a religious horse or dog. Perhaps 
religion is a relic of barbarianism, perhaps it is a proof 
of the kingdom of heaven. Hither way we do appear to 
be ‘‘incurably religious.’’ From the first faint glimmer- 


98 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


ings of archaeology to the remotest horizon of that 
future which we try to read in the reflected light of the 
past, man was religious in the beginning, is now, and 
ever will be. 

Thomas Carlyle called religion ‘‘the deepest thing in 
man.’’ He did not mean by the term, he said, what a 
man may profess or can be induced to subscribe to in 
public, but what deep down in his heart he is convinced 
of, and in his life actually adjusts himself to. His reli- 
gion appears in the answers he gives to his own inmost 
soul when he reflects upon ‘‘the mysterious universe 
in which he finds himself, and his own Duty and Destiny 
in it.’? 

Duty and Destiny—these are great words. Possibly 
you could impress some notion of the meaning of the 
former on an intelligent brute. You cannot convey the 
dimmest notion of the meaning of the latter. Possibly 
there may be a man so brutish as to have no idea of 
either. If there is, let him speak for himself. To our 
generation, with all its recklessness, all its revolt from 
everything that has come down from the past, all its 
rebellion against the voice of tradition or authority, 
they probably are just as full of potential meaning as 
to any earlier one. When we of to-day reflect upon 
‘‘Duty and Destiny’’ does it mean a vague sentiment 
expressed in the formula, ‘‘Be good and you'll be 
happy’’? Or does it mean that we are laboring to reach 
convictions such as character is built on? The difference 
between religion and theology is that one can be ‘‘reli- 
gious’’ (or at least imagine oneself ‘‘religious’’) on a 
vague sentiment, or a feeling of aesthetic aspiration, 
but one cannot be ‘‘theological’’ without logic. 

It is fair to assume that all of us are ‘‘religious’’ to 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 99 


at least the extent of having some interest in matters of 
Duty and Destiny. I think most of us will concede to 
Carlyle also, that the universe in which we happen to 
find ourselves has involved both these terms in no small 
element of ‘‘mystery.’’ It has made thinking on the 
subject hard. Duty and Destiny are delicate subjects. 
With just the right person, in just the right circum- 
stances, we have sometimes ‘‘talked religion.’’ We were 
even glad of the chance. But theology? No! not unless 
like Moliére’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme we talked it 
without knowing it—as perhaps we did. 

Theology is supposed to be remote from all the real 
and practical interests of life. There was a time, they 
say, when the fish-wives in the market-place of Alexan- 
dria disputed the great doctrines of the Church. Pub- 
lishers will tell you there was a time when theological 
books were ‘‘the best sellers.’’? To-day, to command a 
market, your theological book must either be provoca- 
tive (that is, it must be ‘‘polemic’’ theology) or else it 
must have real merit, as the result of hard, logical 
thinking. But in the latter case it should not be labeled 
‘‘theology.’’ Yes, I know, thinking people are really 
keen for the kind of thing Professor Hocking can tell 
them in his Meaning of God in Human Experience, or 
Professor Mackintosh in his Theology as an Empirical 
Science. Only, if you are thinking of writing a treatise 
on theology take a leaf from the book of Mrs. Gamp, 
who when her sentences chanced to rhyme explained to 
Betsy Prig that if she was making poetry it was ‘‘not 
intentional.’’ 

It is pleasant to learn that so excellent a book as 
Professor Hocking’s has gone through a series of print- 
ings. It shows that people will read worth-while books 


100 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


on this subject. But people who bought Hocking’s book 
probably thought it was philosophy or psychology. 
Men and women really do crave to know the best of 
human thought on these mysterious subjects of Duty 
and Destiny. But when they are offered treatises on 
systematic theology, they decline. I wonder why. 

It is more than manifest that men do wish to know 
about religion. It is pathetic. It recalls the great saying 
in Augustine’s Confessions: ‘‘O God, thou hast created 
us for thyself, and our souls are restless till they find 
rest in Thee.’’ Most of all since the War, which has 
made peace on earth and good will among men seem 
a thousand miles farther off than it was before we 
fought, there is a reaction toward religion that aston- 
ishes observers. If ever Christian civilization (so- 
called) proved its own disastrous failure it is now. And 
yet, in this near-collapse of Christendom, men seem to 
realize instinctively that the only trouble with Chris- 
tianity was that there was so little of it. Labor men 
erect class-loyalty into a religion. Politicians try to base 
new popular movements on religious motives, whole- 
some or poisonous. Charlatans, healers, mind-curists, 
and sober-minded medical men have religious (or 
quasi-religious) cures, by which circumambient spirit 
can be made to act on the body. Evangelists and preach- 
ers, some ignorant, some educated, have moral cures, 
by which circumambient spirit can be made to act on the 
conscience and character. You hear of strange reactions 
in the churches, some superstitious, some enlightened, 
some pretending to be enlightened when only supersti- 
tious, some hopeful, some sinister, and with it all an im- ° 
mense addition to the rolls of Church-membership. A 
starving, agonizing, half-ruined earth looks up to 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 101 


heaven in the bitter consciousness that it carries within 
it the seeds of its own destruction, a remorseful, 
shamed, despairing humanity cries out to its Creator: 
Wherefore didst Thou make all men in vain? O 
wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the 
body of this death? Humanity instinctively turns to 
religion as the only possible way out. Oh, for the old 
sense of Duty. Oh, for the former hope of a happier 
Destiny ! ‘‘Religion”’ is the cry; not ‘‘theology.’’ EKmo- 
tion, but not reason. Feeling, but not thinking. Impulse, 
but not logic or experience. 

But that is not our method in business affairs. Busi- 
ness takes the road to ruin the moment we relax the 
control of strict, hard thinking and wise experience. 
How long can we afford to commit the interests of reli- 
gion to uncontrolled emotion? Bishop Gore of Oxford 
and a group of Anglican writers address the world in a 
recent book called The Return to Christendom. The 
writers show a keen realization of the necessity of 
Christianizing the social order. Democracy, they be- 
lieve, is fast yielding to plutocracy, or else to the 
mutually destructive struggle between plutocracy and 
the proletariat. Christendom is nearing collapse. What, 
then, is the remedy? Back to medievalism. A return to 
the Christendom of ecclesiastical control. Back to the 
vision of Augustine and Bernard, the Commonwealth 
of God, under the Vicar of St. Peter and the Church 
councils. Yes, they say, let us appeal to the instinct of 
religion, but keep it under control of ‘‘dogma,’’ as 
defined by prelates and councils. Let the Church define 
orthodoxy and supply the public with what the bishop 
lays down. The public requires to be catechized and 
disciplined, and the heterodox to be silenced. 


102 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


But the bishop himself declines to say what is_ortho- 
dox. That is not the function of a bishop, whose office 
is executive rather than legislative. Once more the lay- 
man is thrown back upon ‘‘private judgment.’’ So 
medievalism breaks down of its own weight. It refuses 
to assume the very responsibility it asked for. 

Modernism has already won the field. Anglo-catholi- 
cism cannot save Christianity at the expense of democ- 
racy in England, any more than ignorant dictatorship 
can bind it in this country with the decrees of a Ken- 
tucky legislature. The domination of dogma is a hope- 
less dream, even if it were desirable. Religion will be 
an instinct of humanity ten thousand years hence as 
truly as to-day. But freedom of religious thinking has 
come to stay. There is to be a religion of the future, a 
Christianity of the future; but not under the domina- 
tion of Pope or proletariat. It will not be religion with- 
out logic, emotion without thought, impulse without 
conviction ; for we do not mean our children to be swept 
back into the wild fanaticism of ignorant and supersti- 
tious savages. Religion will be under the control of 
reason and conscience, educated, free, democratic. It 
will have theology, but not scholasticism; doctrine, but 
not dogma. It will have the ethics, conviction, and 
character of the open forum of scientific debate. The 
bishop declines to think for you. Thank heaven. Think 
for yourself. 

It is this kind of theology to which Professor Francis 
Peabody welcomes our ‘‘Return’’ in a recent number of 
the Yale Review. Professor Peabody is a veteran ex- 
ponent of Christianity, a scholar known and loved on’ 
both sides of the Atlantic, and a firm adherent of that 
branch of the Church which goes farthest in the direc- 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 103 


tion of Christian liberty and enlightenment. Therefore, 
if Professor Peabody sees and welcomes a Return to 
Theology, I rejoice at the good news. Men are actually 
beginning to think that reason, logic, science, experi- 
ence, criticism, have something to do with religious 
belief and conduct. It seems too good to be true. But 
with God all things are possible. 

Down to Reformation times people believed that they 
maintained priests and prelates to save themselves the 
trouble of thinking in matters of religion. Real thinking 
is hard anyway, and religious thinking has special diffi- 
culties of its own, some natural, some artificial. For a 
thousand years after Christianity was established in 
the Empire the people called in the specialists, and the 
specialists asked acceptance of their results without 
inspection—/fides wmplicita. The result was stagnation 
of thought for a thousand years, repression, explosion. 
After the Reformation came a new attempt along simi- 
lar lines. It was less trouble for the laity, and much 
less for the clergy, if you could make a miraculous book 
take the place of thinking. So the post-Reformation 
dogmatists followed the example of the Rabbis, and 
told the laity the Bible was a substitute for thinking. 
Some people welcome the assurance that too much 
thinking is bad for the laity. But most Americans are 
democrats. In malice, let us hope, they are babies; but 
in understanding they aspire to be full-grown men. 
They dislike having the decisions made for them. Quite 
a lot of them are Baptists, and believe in democracy 
in the Church, freedom of religious opinion, and reli- 
gious education. Therefore when Professor Peabody 
heard the echoes from Indiana in the summer of 1922, 
he sat down like an old prophet and wrote that article 


104 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


full of hope called ‘‘A Return to Theology.’’ Is it 
true? 

Unfortunately ready-made theology is cheap and 
easy, and the self-made is hard. So it must be until 
somebody discovers the royal road to learning. Mean- 
time you will be plagued to death by people who want 
to take the job of religious thinking for you at the 
cheapest rates. They will charge you nothing for it 
because it costs them nothing. You can have a million 
copies for a few cents. But it is very expensive at the 
price. It costs personal effort to do your own thinking. 
It costs more in the realm of religion than anywhere 
else. But it is worth while. Popes and priests, and poli- 
ticians and popular preachers will be only too delighted 
to make up your mind for you, if you will let them. 
Then you will give them your votes and influence. But 
that is the weakness of democracy ; it’s such an unend- 
ing lot of trouble. You have to keep everlastingly at it, 
thinking, and thinking, and thinking. And the moment 
you let up, along comes some charlatan and induces you 
to part with your birthright for a mess of pottage. 
Kternal vigilance is the price of liberty. 

But there is another, more special, reason for a 
return to theology. Ministers too—some of them—were 
dodging the hard kind of thinking. Even some of the 
so-called systematic theologians were doing it. The 
recent incumbent of one of the most illustrious chairs 
in America told me some years ago that he could only 
accept the appointment on the understanding that his 
courses were really to be in the history of doctrine. 
That is, he was going to make himself a mere echo of 
the past. That is safer and easier, of course, than say- 
ing: This is the problem; here is the evidence; what 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 105 


is the logical conclusion? Perhaps echoing the past is 
all we have a right to expect from our systematic 
theologians; unfortunately in a good many cases it is 
all we are getting. And when I realized how much 
alleged systematic theology consists of what somebody 
else thought on the great problems of life, somewhere 
from three hundred to two thousand years ago, I cease 
to wonder so much that people don’t care to buy it. The 
fact is, I am not particularly anxious myself to read 
what Edwards, or Calvin, or Anselm, thought about the 
Trinity, or life after death. 

But what about the doctrinal sermons? Are the 
preachers leading their people to think on the great 
religious problems? Last week a gentleman spoke to 
me of a great sermon he had just heard. ‘‘I was 
afraid,’’ said he, ‘‘it was going to be doctrinal.’’ But 
to his great relief it turned out to be a practical exhor- 
tation. For a full generation now we have heard ‘‘ethi- 
cal preaching.’’ We have been told which way to turn, 
but nothing as to where we are going. Right conduct 
has been the end in view, what ought to be done by the 
individual, the Church, the nation, the state, the 
schools, the family, society, the shop, the newspaper; 
ethics of home, of state, of business, of politics, of 
economics, of international relations, of every other 
kind of relations: There has been no end of it. And 
there ought to be none. After so many generations of a 
kind of Christianity whose main business seemed to be 
the getting one’s own miserable soul out of the punish- 
ment it deserved, it was time to forget that I have 


A never dying soul to save 
And fit it for the sky. 


106 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


It was time to remember that the Author of this salva- 
tion went about saying ‘‘He that would save his soul 
shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his soul for my 
sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it.’’ Yes, 
surely it was worth while to have at least one genera- 
tion of ‘‘ethical preaching,’’ to cry out, Duty, Duty, 
Duty, in a world that cannot be saved without the inter- 
vention of God. It was worth while to have one genera- 
tion learn what Jesus meant when He came proclaim- 
ing: ‘‘The kingdom of God is at hand. Seek that first. 
Live for it. Die for it.’’ 

But it is also worth while to give a little thought to 
what you mean by this word ‘‘God,’’ and this phrase 
‘‘the kingdom of God.’’ It is worth while also to have 
some notion of Destiny, as well as Duty. Unless men 
have spirits as well as bodies, never-dying souls ap- 
pointed for some kind of Destiny, working for the 
kingdom of God seems to me to stand on about the same 
level as working for public sanitation, or hygienics, or 
eugenics, or an Antipoverty League. John Smith calls 
to you as you pass: ‘‘ Hey, there. I hear you are a minis- 
ter of the gospel. Tell us about it.’’ So you tell him of 
your economics, eugenics, and hygienics. ‘‘Is that all?”’ 
says John Smith. ‘‘All this have I heard from my 
youth. Let us continue to eat and drink, for to-morrow 
we die.’? How many uplifters we have, whose gospel is, 
‘Improve the conditions, and man’s spirit will improve 
itself.’? When I was a boy humanity had become master 
of the world in one dimension. Steam transportation by 
land and sea, and steam manufacture, had opened 
enormous natural resources. Recently we have added 
two dimensions more. We now control the depths of the 
sea and the upper air. The first use of the new power 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 107 


was enormous devastation, the submarine and the 
bombing airplane. By high explosives and poison gas 
it is now possible to destroy in a few months all the 
accumulations of a thousand years of civilization. Note 
the vast improvement of the human spirit through 
scientific, mechanical, and economic progress. 

Or perhaps we should pin our hopes to social and 
political progress. There is the splendid example of 
Russia, and the sovietizing of industry in the rest of 
the world. Jesus undoubtedly desired a new and better 
social order. But Jesus was not a socialist, and pulpit 
and soapbox do not stand for the same thing. We have 
apostles of good health who would make the Church a 
clinic, or a gymnasium. Jesus healed. But He did not 
come to be a healer. He avoided the importunities of 
the sick in body that He might have opportunity to 
minister to the sick in soul. I myself like healthy men. 
But I have seen some saints who were not, and were 
of more use to the world than their healthy neighbors. 
Christians must seek first the kingdom of God. And a 
right spirit in individuals and the body politic is quite 
as important for the kingdom of God as healthy bodies, 
though healthy bodies are desirable also. 

Where are we going? What are we aiming at? What 
do we mean when we talk of ‘‘consecration to the ideals 
of Jesus Christ’’? These are practical questions, how- 
ever ‘‘theological.’’ They are fundamental questions 
of the urgent inexorable present, questions of Duty and 
Destiny in the mysterious universe in which we find 
ourselves. Poor and rich, sick and well, we have to meet 
them with an answer. Whether economic conditions are 
improved or not, whether health and sanitation are im- 
proved or not, whether we live or die, these questions 


108 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


will not wait. We must do our living for to-day and to- 
morrow by the answers we frame for them. What is our 
Duty? What is our Destiny? 

It might, then, be well for ministers who have the 
leisure to teach a little theology. They should not adver- 
tise a class in the subject unless prepared to find an 
attendance of half the number expected, but they might 
try once in a while to give a rationally thought-out reply 
to the questions men have to answer for themselves 
without knowing that this is theology: ‘‘ Who, or what, 
is God’’? ‘‘What does He expect of me?’’ ‘‘What may 
I expect of Him?’’ The questions may be asked and 
answered perfunctorily, catechism-fashion; or they 
may be answered in words that have been 


fierily furnaced 
In the blast of a soul that has struggled in earnest. 


If answered in the latter way they will not lack interest. 
But the answers will not be easy. 

There is still another reason why men in our genera- 
tion are seeking fresh answers to these age-long ques- 
tions. The War waked us up to a realizing sense that 
they do not stay answered from one generation to the 
next. If you think that a past theology can serve the 
present age, then you should read the reports of some 
of our army chaplains, and see what pitiful, perfunc- 
tory, unreal stuff our young men believed to be Chris- 
tianity, or else believed they ought to believe as Chris- 
tianity. 


We had forgotten You, or very nearly— 
You did not seem to touch us very nearly— 
Of course we thought about You now and then; 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 109 


Especially in any time of trouble— 
We knew that You were good in time of trouble— 
But we are very ordinary men. 


* * * % bd 


Now we remember, over here in Flanders— 

(It isn’t strange to think of You in Flanders)— 
This hideous warfare seems to make things clear. 

We never thought about You much in England— 

But now that we are far away from England— 
We have no doubts, we know that You are here. 


We think about You kneeling in the garden— 
Ah, God, the agony of that dread garden— 
We know You prayed for us upon the cross. 
If anything could make us glad to bear it 
*Twould be the knowledge that You willed to bear it— 
Pain, death, the uttermost of human loss. 


Though we forgot You—You will not forget us— 
We feel so sure that You will not forget us— 

But stay with us until this dream is past. 
And so we ask for courage, strength, and pardon— 
Especially, I think, we ask for pardon— 

And that You’ll stand beside us to the last. 


That is the pathetic cry of a perfunctory and con- 
ventional Christian teaching, suddenly awakened to the 
realization that the ‘‘word of the cross’? is all the gos- 
pel, all the religion that we have; and that we now must 
make the most of it, though we had ‘‘never thought 
about You much in England.’’ Does our Christianity 
mean much to us, or does it mean nothing but a dream? 

Some time ago I had an answer to a question on the 
Epistle to the Hebrews in an examination paper. The 
student told me that its unknown author ‘‘rambled 


110 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


through the whole field of theology.’’? That was a sin- 
cere and a revealing word. It meant that nothing in 
that splendid oration of Hebrews had ‘‘touched that 
student very nearly.’’ To him it was mere religious 
words out of a past that was alien and unreal to him. 
Hebrews is a writing by an unknown Christian leader 
of the second generation, who is sending a message to 
his regiment, a few moments before the zero hour, when 
they have got to go ‘‘over the top.’’? He himself can- 
not be with them. He is an exile or a prisoner; but he 
calls to mind the martyrdom of the Captain and 
Pioneer of their salvation, Jesus, who fulfilled it before 
Pontius Pilate but a few short years before. It is a 
thrilling call to heroism, ringing with the courage and 
faith of one himself prepared to tread in the footsteps 
of the great High Priest of humanity, who now stands 
in the presence of God. 

But of course we read our Bibles to-day as did the 
eunuch of Candace, of whom Philip asked, ‘‘Under- 
standest thou what thou readest?’’ Men have to answer 
to-day as the eunuch did, ‘‘ How can I, except some man 
guide me?’’ Well, a twentieth-century American could 
not be expected to enter into the spirit of a first-century 
Alexandrian, and realize what he was reading, unless 
some man would guide him. So I do not wonder that my 
student thought the author of Hebrews was just ‘‘ram- 
bling through the whole field of theology.’’ In reality 
this unknown officer in the Church of the generation 
after Paul was showing to his followers how the whole 
system of sacrifice and ritual, priesthood, temple, festi- 
vals, and sacrifice instituted in the past, had given way 
now to a new reality. We have access now, ‘‘by a new 
and living way,’’ to the God that before could only be 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 111 


reached through temples and ritual observances. Jesus 
the martyr, Jesus the true and eternal Priest, has 
entered before us into the very presence of His Father, 
the ‘Father’ of Jesus’ prayers. That is the Being whom 
again and again this writer calls ‘‘the living God,’’ the 
God of actuality, not of the book-religion of the past. 
Jesus, to him, brought God near. 

That is what the martyrdom of the great High Priest 
of humanity did for his brethren two thousand years 
ago. Jesus ‘‘brought men near’’ to His Father as ‘‘the 
living God.’’ It is pathetic that men should be still 
crying out to-day for guidance to the God and Father 
of our Lord Jesus Christ, as the living God. That was 
the God who really does things, the God whom Jesus 
trusted, the God that seemed to forsake Him on the 
cross, and then made Him the Author of an eternal 
salvation, the God not of the past, nor of a book, but 
the God of things as they really are. Do we, to-day, 
really guide men to the living God? Isaiah said to the 
men of his time: 


All vision is become to you as the words of a book that is 
sealed, which men deliver to one that is learned, saying, Read 
this, I pray thee; and he saith, I cannot, for it is sealed. (If I 
tell you what is really there I shall be stoned and silenced and 
cast out of the Church.) And the book is delivered to him that 
is not learned, saying, Read this, I pray thee; and he saith, I 
am not learned. 


Nobody knows the name of the author of Hebrews. 
He had heard something, probably not a great deal, 
from eyewitnesses and ministers of the word in the 
generation before, of the martyrdom of Jesus. He knew 
of Jesus’ prayer and suffering to bring humanity back 


112 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


into right relation with God. He knew the story of His 
kneeling in the garden—‘‘ Ah, God, the agony of that 
dread garden’’—and he thought that story of the cross 
worth more to religion than all the ritual of temple 
and shrine, sacrifice and offering of bulls and goats 
from Melchizedek down. He had found in this brother 
man, obedient unto the-death of the cross, a real and 
living Priest, a Mediator, who had passed into the 
presence of the living God, and who ever liveth there, 
to make intercession for us. 

I admit that this unknown author is a theologian. He 
has read the great works of Plato and Philo, and can 
handle the splendors of Greek rhetoric with greater 
ease than any other writer of the New Testament. But 
this is not his title to greatness. His greatness lies in 
his realizing sense, similar to that of Paul, that the 
living God had spoken in his time, that the story of 
what Jesus did is a revelation, a restoration of lost 
humanity by the intervention of One who through this 
Great Shepherd of the sheep brought us into the new 
and eternal covenant of peace. In the spirit of Jesus 
he had suddenly caught a vision of God, the real, the 
actual, the ‘‘living God.’’ 

What, then, was this story which this unknown writer 
knew, eclipsing all the revelations of former times? Is 
it to us also a revelation of the living God? This cul- 
tured Alexandrian knew that Jesus, a Galilean car- 
penter of the generation just before his own, had come 
forward after the martyrdom of John, the Elijah of 
that generation, taking up John’s work and carrying it 
to its completion. Jesus himself looked on John as sent — 
by God to accomplish the Great Repentance, turning 
the heart of Israel back again, as Elijah did at Carmel, 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 113 


so that the day of Jehovah’s coming might not smite 
the earth with a curse. A Jewish writer two hundred 
years before had declared this task of Elijah to be the 
reconciliation of Jehovah to his sinful people. 


Elijah, he says, was recorded for reproofs in their seasons, 
To pacify anger before it brake forth into wrath; 

To turn the heart of the Father (God) unto the son (Israel) 
And to restore the tribes of Jacob. 


Jesus conceived the work of John as that ‘‘restora- 
tion of all things’’ in a great repentance of Israel which 
should bring about reconciliation to ‘‘the Father”’ ere 
it should be too late. There is the background of the 
story of Jesus. When John was shut up in prison Jesus 
came forward and took up the prophet’s message. He 
carried it on in Galilee, and Peraea and Jerusalem, pre- 
dicting that he would be made to share the fate of John. 
He did. He also suffered the same things of them, in the 
city that slew the prophets, and stoned them that were 
sent unto her. So much we may be sure the author of 
Hebrews knew of the earthly life of Jesus; for so much 
is implied in the great letters of Paul, some of which 
this writer uses. Jesus came, as Paul says, ‘‘ preaching 
peace to him that is far off, and peace to him that is 
nigh, because both Jew and Gentile, near and far off, 
have access in one Spirit—His Spirit—unto the 
Father.’’ It was a work of reconciliation of Father to 
son, and son to Father, in repentance and forgiveness. 
Jesus meant it for His own people. He felt called to 
serve them first. Paul extended the reconciliation idea 
to all estranged humanity. 

What the author of Hebrews had was a mere story, a 
bit of recent martyrology. Jesus, to accomplish the reli- 


114 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


gious ideal of His nation, had done what Quintus Cur- 
tius and other heroes did to accomplish the military 
ideals of their nations. What makes Jesus’ story more 
than a hero-tale? What makes it a ‘‘gospel,’”’ a revela- 
tion of God? What gives it eternal significance to peo- 
ple that want to know who God is, what He expects of | 
them, what they may expect of Him? What made the 
story of Calvary an ‘‘eternal’’ gospel? The part of 
God in it. Well, what did God do? According to these 
ancient writers He made Jesus the agent by which 
humanity in its wickedness and misery was brought 
back to Himself. ‘‘The very God of peace,’’ says this 
writer, ‘‘brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, 
that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of 
an eternal covenant,’’—the ‘‘new covenant’’ of forgive- 
ness, laws written on the heart, filial relations with a 
F'ather-God—so that this living God might ‘‘make us 
all perfect, working in us, through the age of J esus, 
what is well pleas to himself.”’ 

The author of Hebrews believes God does that 
through Jesus, for individuals—for the world. Well, 
does He? Try it. Let the world try it. That is the only 
way to know whether it is so or not. Try it, and put 
down your results. That will be empirical theology: 
what God did, what God does. Does He, did He, re- 
store not only Israel, but a whole groaning, perishing 
world to His favor and peace through the spirit of 
Jesus? That is the practical question. 

Go back a step from the author of Hebrews to Paul, 
the man who took the story of Jesus’ work for the 
reconciliation of Israel, and made it applicable to 
humanity. 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 115 


This is the apostolic message in the very words of the 
first theologian of the Church: 


All things are of God, who reconciled (mankind) to himself 
through Christ, and gave unto us (heralds of the cross) the 
ministry of the Reconciliation; to wit, that God through the 
agency of Christ was restoring the world to his favor, not 
reckoning unto men their trespasses. And he hath committed 
unto us the message of the Reconciliation. We (apostles) there- 
fore are ambassadors on behalf of Christ, as though God were 
entreating by us; we beseech you on behalf of Christ, accept 
this restoration to God’s favor. 


I know that Paul must have told the story of the 
cross as part of his message, because he alludes to the 
fact as characterizing his preaching at Corinth. I know 
he must have related the incidents of the farewell sup- 
per; because in correcting abuses in the celebrations at 
Corinth he reminds them of the story of ‘‘the same 
night in which he was betrayed,’’ and bids them remem- 
ber that in the ritual ‘‘ye are telling the story (xaray- 
yednere) Of the Lord’s death until he come.’’ But I am 
not so foolish as to imagine that Paul thought he could 
offer the world a ‘‘gospel of peace’’ by anything which 
does not bring men into contact with the living God 
by showing Him at work. Telling men the beautiful 
system of ethics Jesus taught in Galilee does not give 
them a gospel. Telling the marvels of healing that took 
place while He went about preaching repentance is not 
a gospel. Telling how He was martyred for the king- 
dom’s sake is not a gospel, unless somehow, somewhere, 
you can show that the hand of the living eternal God 
was at work in the matter. 

Now that is just the part that historical criticism 


116 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


leaves out. Not because it questions it, or doubts it, or 
objects to it; but simply because criticism is historical 
and not theological. It undertakes to say what hap- 
pened. ‘‘Did God have anything to do with its hap- 
pening that way?’’ you ask. ‘‘I don’t know,”’’ says 
criticism. ‘‘I am not a theologian. That is none of eh 
business. ’’ 

But Paul was a theologian. Knowing from his letters 
what he thought of his commission from God I am not 
surprised to find that Paul never mentions a single 
mighty work of Jesus, and scarcely ever a saying. He 
knew that you cannot save a lost world by anything 
which does not bring them into contact with the God 
and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. If by the story 
of the cross you can give men a solution of their prob- 
lems of Duty and Destiny then you have a gospel. Did 
this Galilean know this living God and solve our bitter 
problem? If so He has something to say to us. If not, 
He is just one more Teacher of another system of 
ethics, a little better than some of the others that went 
before. If Jesus knew God, and how to live and die in 
the peace of God, and how to bring men near to God, 
then He is worthy to be called the world’s Christ—not 
merely Israel’s Christ, but the Christ of humanity. For 
that is what humanity needs. It needs to be ‘‘shown the 
Father.’’ If Jesus can do that, if He can give us His 
peace, He has a gospel for us. Paul, the theologian 
apostle, thinks that Jesus does give men through the 
spirit in which He lived and died—if we can define it— 
‘faccess to the Father.’’ Paul’s follower thinks that 
Jesus shows a ‘‘new and living way’’ by which men can . 
come to the Father. He anne the very God of peace 
made Him the author of ‘‘an eternal salvation’? for all 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 117 


humanity. At all events, this layman of Nazareth does 
make religion something real, not the mere dead letter 
of a book. 

Paul is the first Christian theologian. After Calvary 
the eleven sat down and drew lots as to who should 
fill the place of Judas. They made up their minds as to 
what the world really needed. 


Of the men, therefore, that have companied with us all the 
time that the Lord Jesus went in and went out among us, 
beginning from the baptism of John, unto the day that he was 
received up from us, of these must one become a witness with 
us of his resurrection. 


Such were the qualifications of an Apostle as the 
eleven conceived it. Such is the testimony we try to 
get from criticism. They thought the world needed to 
be told the anecdotes and the sayings that they could 
remember, and testify before courts to the reality of 
the resurrection body as having seen it themselves. 
There you have all the marks of an apostleship through 
men, by a man. So they drew lots, as between Joseph 
and Matthias, and decided that because it did not fall 
on Joseph, therefore the Lord (!) had chosen Matthias. 
So he was numbered with the eleven apostles, and that 
is the last that was ever heard of him. 

And the Lord Himself set to work to choose His own 
apostle, not from men, neither through a man, but by 
appointment direct from heaven. And He chose Saul of 
Tarsus, a man that had never seen Jesus in the flesh, 
and if he had, tells us in so many words that he would 
‘*forget it.’? The eleven chose Matthias. Doubtless he 
could tell ever so many anecdotes about Jesus’ doings 
and sayings, about how He looked and acted; for had 


118 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


he not companied with the apostles the whole time from 
the baptism of John to the Ascension? And God chose 
Paul, and made him the herald of a world gospel ‘‘from 
Jerusalem round about unto Illyricum,’’ the second 
founder of the faith, who made it a message of redemp- 
tion for the whole world, simply because he realized 
that God was restoring the world in Christ. 

Thank the Lord that He chose one theologian! Thank 
God for one apostle who knew himself to be charged 
by the Lord with a message to all humanity! Thank God 
for one man who could see the real significance of the 
events that had taken place, either because (or in spite 
of) the fact that he had originally set out to persecute 
this Way unto the death! For Saul of Tarsus knew 
that as between Pharisaism, the religion of the Book, 
and this new Way of access to the living God and 
Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, there must be war to 
extermination. There is no truce between Law and 
Gospel. Hither you can be saved by obeying the pre- 
cepts of a book, according to the application of a lot of 
learned interpreters who sit in Moses’ seat, or else you 
cannot. Paul had tried Pharisaism to the bitter end, 
and knew that you cannot have peace with God that 
way. That way ‘‘a wrath of God is manifested,’’ as it is 
written, ‘‘cursed is every one that abideth not in all 
things that are written in the book of the law to do 
them.’’ The law cannot give life, because of the inherent 
weakness of human flesh. It is an ordinance of death, 
a sentence, a Judgment, a condemnation. Then, if you 
cannot escape the wrath of the God of righteousness by 
any attempted obedience to moral precepts, is there any 
escape? The Christians said there was. They believed in 
forgiveness through the grace of the Lord Jesus. They 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 119 


believed that He had gone into the presence of God, 
there to make intercession for their forgiveness. 
Whether He had or not, they knew God was ‘‘in him.’’ 
They had seen ‘‘the living God’’ in His face. That was 
religion, gospel. It brought them ‘‘near’’ to God. 

Of course, Paul, a scribe and Pharisee, who believed 
in a divine revelation to Moses, and that the one hope 
of redemption for the world lay in submission to this 
holy law, would have to be a persecutor to the death 
of such a doctrine as the gospel of Jesus. It gave an 
entirely new way of reconciliation with God, utterly 
_ inconsistent with the law and the prophets. Tolerate 
it, and you threw open the doors of the kingdom of 
heaven to every miserable believer, worthy or un- 
worthy. You took away the prerogative of Israel. You 
offered a new Way of acceptance, reconciliation, peace 
with God, to Tom, Dick, and Harry, Jew or Greek, bar- 
barian, Scythian, bondman, freeman. Can you imagine 
a Pharisee of Pharisees, a Hebrew of Hebrews, of the 
tribe of Benjamin, a zealot for the law, tolerating that 
kind of doctrine? Not while he believed in Moses, and a 
righteousness of his own, even that which is through 
the law. That was Saul, the Pharisee. 

But Jesus Christ needed a theologian to take the real 
meaning of His work and make it clear to humanity. 
God needed a theologian to teach men that the gospel 
is the thing that He does and will do through the agency 
of this eternal Christ of mankind, not a lot of anecdotes 
about the sayings and doings of Jesus, and how He was 
seen in vision after He had risen from the dead, by men 
that had companied with Him. God needed an ambassa- 
dor of peace to the world. God needed a man who real- 
ized what humanity needs as Paul realized it. God 


120 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


needed a messenger to tell how a man can have peace 
with the real and living God, the God and Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ. And so while the eleven were 
drawing lots to see whether Joseph or Matthias would 
make the best successor to Judas Iscariot, God chose 
Paul. He needed such a man to be a minister of a new 
Covenant—not that old Covenant of Sinai, which since 
Jeremiah’s time scribes had been vainly trying to im- 
pose on men as a kind of book religion, but a new cove- 
nant of the forgiveness of sins, as it is written: 


Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a 
new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of 
Judah. . . . For this is the covenant that I will make with the 
house of Israel after those days, saith the Lord; I will put my 
laws into their mind, and on their heart also will I write them. 
And I will be to them a God, and they shall be to me a people. 
. . . For I will be merciful to their iniquities, and their sins 
will I remember no more. 


Paul, and the writer of Hebrews, knew what Jere- 
miah meant by his prophecy of the ‘‘new covenant’? of 
the living God with His redeemed people. Paul realized 
that the story of the cross, as something that God had 
done ‘‘through the agency of Christ,’’ was a gospel of 
peace from God, to a world lying in darkness and con- 
demnation. He probably knew very little of the life of 
Jesus. He knew about what he could learn in a two 
weeks’ visit at Jerusalem from James the Lord’s 
brother, and the Apostle Peter. He knew what sort of 
character it produces, when a man’s whole heart and 
soul and strength and mind are consecrated to one 
thing only, the doing of the will of his Father, and the 
sanctifying of His name on earth. Paul could know 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 121 


what sort of spirit the spirit of Jesus was, and how it 
corresponded with that spirit of the Servant of Jeho- 
vah of whom Isaiah had written. Therefore he could 
urge men who wanted like unity with God to ‘‘have in 
them the mind which was in Christ Jesus,’’ who ‘‘hum- 
bled himself and took upon him the form of a Servant, 
and became obedient unto death, even the death of the 
cross.’’? That was enough. 

Paul probably had never heard the story of the 
virgin birth. If he had ever heard of any of the miracles 
he gives no sign of it. He says that Jesus ‘‘knew no 
sin,’’ but he did not learn even that by enquiries at 
Nazareth as to whether Jesus obeyed His mother when 
He was a little boy. He found it written in the prophecy 
of Isaiah of the suffering Servant. Paul simply knew 
that by this man’s devotion of Himself to death for the 
sake of God’s kingdom, the people that had been 
estranged from God were reconciled. God had made the 
Carpenter of Nazareth His agent to accomplish the 
reconciliation. 

What then, did it matter to this Apostle of the Gen- 
tiles whether this man that God had chosen to lift the 
ban from humanity was the wisest that ever lived, or 
the simplest, whether He had the power of God, or was 
‘crucified through weakness,’’ though living now 
through the power of God; whether He was an arch- 
angel or just a Galilean Teacher and Leader of the 
publicans and sinners to repentance? What does it 
matter to us whether this theologian Paul, like some 
later ones, was led off into metaphysics in his endeavor 
to identify that eternal redeeming spirit of God that 
was in Christ, starting speculation along the dubious 
lines of the Logos doctrine? We can make our own 


122 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


metaphysics. We can make our own Logos doctrine. 
What does it matter to us, who have our own theology 
to make, and who desire only to see God in Christ, how 
Paul adjusted his beliefs concerning the preéxistent 
Wisdom of God, creative and redemptive, to his 
thought of Christ, so long as we know from the testi- 
mony that God was ‘‘in him’’? His work was God’s 
work. To us also the glory of the redeeming, forgiving 
God is revealed in the face of Jesus Christ. We have 
faith in this God, because He is the God and Father of 
our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Beside this manifestation of God ‘‘in the face of 
Jesus Christ,’’ as visible to us to-day as it was to Paul, 
it does not matter whether the virgin birth story, and 
the miracles of walking on the sea, raising of the dead, 
or changing water to wine, are fact or legend, history 
or wonder-story. Did God make of Jesus His agent to 
restore the world to His favor, not imputing unto men 
their trespasses? Had the eternal, the ‘‘living’’ God, 
done this; and is He doing it now? If so, that is ‘‘the 
eternal gospel.’’ And that you can verify for yourself, 
as Paul verified it. That the world can verify if it will. 
This, I say, is our modern return to theology. We are 
brought through this man Jesus to know His Father in 
heaven, Jew and Gentile, barbarian, Scythian, bond- 
man, freeman, near and far-off, we are brought nigh in 
one spirit—His spirit—unto the common Father. That 
may be theology, but it is also fact. It is an eternally 
self-verifiable truth, whenever individuals, or the world, 
are willing to put it to the test. Get all the facts you can 
from Matthias, from criticism, and then go to the theo- | 
logian Paul, and ask: Had God anything to do with this, 
or not? 


THE RETURN TO THEOLOGY 123 


Can a man, through the spirit of Jesus have access to 
God? Can he have a religion which solves for him the 
problem of Duty and Destiny? That is a question first 
of all of experience, afterwards of ‘‘theology.’’ Paul 
had both. For a generation or so Christian pulpits have 
been resounding with ethics. Our ministers have all 
been Matthiases. We have been incessantly bombarded 
with new discoveries or supposed discoveries about the 
career and teaching of Jesus. Criticism has been called 
upon to tell the last atom of truth, or supposed truth, 
that could be wrung from the scanty records to tell 
what Jesus said and did, what He looked like, where He 
ate and slept and walked. Read all your critical and 
pseudo-critical and fanciful and historical and every 
other kind of lives of Christ. It is of great importance. 
I myself have devoted a lifetime to it. I am not going to 
disparage its value. If there was no historical Jesus we 
simply do not know what we are talking about when we 
say God made this humble Nazarene His agent for the 
redemption of humanity. But after you have done all 
that thank God for one theologian apostle, that had the 
insight to realize that what the world needs is to have 
access to God, and that through the spirit of Jesus a 
man can have it. 

Is there, or is there not, in our time, the beginning of 
a return to theology? By the grace of God I believe 
there is. I believe men really are beginning to want to 
know something about the living God. The God that is 
actually at work around us and in us, the very same of 
whom Paul said, quoting a heathen poet, ‘‘For in him 
we live and move and have our being.’’ Really men are 
coming to think it is worth while to think about Duty 
and Destiny in this mysterious universe in which we 


124 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


find ourselves, and that it does even matter to us what 
the purest, noblest, most God-loving, devoted man that 
ever lived felt toward this God that seemed to have 
forsaken Him on the cross. 


We think about You kneeling in the garden— 

Ah, God, the agony of that dread garden— 
We know You prayed for us upon the cross. 

If anything could make us glad to bear it— 

’Twould be the knowledge that You willed to bear it— 
Pain, death, the uttermost of human loss. 


Though we forgot You—You will not forget us— 
We feel so sure that You will not forget us— 

But stay with us until this dream is past. 
And so we ask for courage, strength, and pardon— 
Especially I think, we ask for pardon— 

And that You’ll stand beside us to the last. 


LIFE AFTER DEATH 


WILLARD L. SPERRY 


Dean of the Theological School in Harvard University. 
Author of ‘‘The Discipline of Inberty.’’ 7 





CHAPTER VII 
LIFE AFTER DEATH 
WILLARD L. SPERRY 


WHEN Henry Thoreau lay dying in Concord his 
brother came to him seeking some expression of confi- 
dence in the life hereafter. Thoreau, running perfectly 
true to form, looked up and with a wan smile said, ‘‘One 
world at a time, brother, one world at a time.’’ 

This wholesome gospel of one world at a time repre- 
sents the major mood of our modern practical Chris- 
tianity. To live rightly and well in this world is our 
plain duty and the best possible preparation for any 
world hereafter. There is among us, or at least there 
was before the War, a disinclination to linger too long 
in the presence of the fact of death, a tendency to dis- 
miss it sentimentally rather than to grapple with it and 
wrest from it some kind of answer to the problem it 
presents. The War, however, has altered that mood. 
A fresh and fearless realism has come into our think- 
ing. Death has become an accepted and inevitable fact 
of common life. ‘‘In every cottage in England,’’ said 
an Oxford don, ‘‘there is to-day a monument to unan- 
swered prayer.’’ What was in quieter days the occa- 
sional sombre event in the community became the norm. 
Our generation, with its ten millions of men untimely 
dead in War, no longer shirks the fact and the problem, 
and is no longer indifferent to the further hope. All 
over the world the old question is asked with new insist- 
ency, ‘‘If a man die shall he live again?”’ 


128 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


May I deal first with the attempts to give a scientific 
answer to this question? Science has to do with the 
world of immediate sense experience. It aims to order 
and to interpret that world. The great religious sys- 
tems of the past and of the present have assumed that 
we do not have and cannot have sense experience of 
any other life in any other world than this, and that 
therefore the assurance of immortality belongs to 
those realms discovered by supernatural revelation or 
essayed by acts of faith. 

The latest and most ambitious of the sciences is the 
would-be science of psychical research. It has yet to. 
make good its place as a science of the first rank. But 
the boldness of its assertions and the comfort which it 
has undoubtedly offered to thousands of perplexed and 
sorrowful persons in the modern world entitle it to 
serious attention. In the immediate past, as in the 
present, it has had the sanction and support of many 
of the finer and more adventurous spirits in the world 
of philosophy and theology. And no scientist of the 
first rank is prepared to deny all validity to its pro- 
ceedings. 

The sole aim of this science is to vindicate the con- 
tinuance of conscious personality after death, with the 
memory, the affections, the purposes, which make up 
personal life. We should not dismiss the ‘‘messages’’ 
received because they seem to be trivial. It is by trivial 
bits of evidence that the truthfulness of the witness is 
confirmed. This science has no immediate interest to 
discover and announce what heaven is like, since there 
is no way of ‘‘checking up’’ evidence upon that matter. 
But it is jealous for those stray intimations, coming 
from the unknown world, as to what happened in this 


LIFE AFTER DEATH 129 


world, because such evidence can be proved or dis- 
proved here below. For that reason the Society for 
Psychical Research is far more soberly concerned with 
what they conceive Professor James has said about his 
‘‘pink pyjamas,’’ than in his account of the hereafter. 
The ‘‘pink pyjamas’”’ and all for which they stand can 
be verified; heaven cannot be verified by any checking 
system available to us. Religiously we deplore the 
references to such trivial and mundane paraphernalia, 
but scientifically we must be jealous for them. The 
society in question has gathered, through its sittings 
and mediums, a body of alleged communications as to 
facts in the lives of persons now dead which is very 
challenging. It is difficult to understand, in many cases, 
how knowledge of these facts could be present in the 
mind, conscious or subconscious, of the medium or in 
the mind of any sitter. Science is always bound to 
accept the simpler and more immediate solution as 
against the more involved and remote solution. At 
times it is hard to resist the conclusion that this science- 
in-the-making does prove its case. I can only confess in 
my own case and plead in the case of others that open- 
mindedness which is the welcome waiting for each new 
discovery in the world. 

There is, however, one serious ethical consideration 
in the case which seems to me to deserve mention. I 
have it upon the word of a man who gave the latter 
part of his life almost entirely to this concern, that the 
medium through whom the messages are received must 
be a person of unstable mental stuff. There must be 
some ‘‘crack’’ or flaw in the earthen vessel. The me- 
dium is not a normal person. Moreover, the state of 
trance is a great mental strain upon the medium, tend- 


180 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


ing toward greater mental instability. So much is this 
so that no reputable enquirer makes undue demand 
upon his medium. One seance or two a week are all that 
can be sanctioned. Beyond that lies undue strain for 
the medium. 

Now it is one of the precepts of the moral life that — 
we shall treat other human beings as ends in themselves 
and not as means to some other end. And there are 
more kinds of prostitution in this world than the sad 
trade which bears that name. One must feel that this 
whole method of approaching the other world is open 
to grave moral question. It is a serious matter for us 
to satisfy our natural curiosity or to seek solace for 
private grief at the expense of the stability of another 
human mind. There is here the peril of a grave prosti- 
tution. The moral man must satisfy himself that this 
method of seeking truth does not involve him in an im- 
moral use of the agent of his quest. This seems to me 
the one serious objection to the methods which must be 
employed in this enquiry. 

There is one further comment which may fitly be 
made upon this quest after assurance that those whom 
we have loved and lost awhile still live; for this is the 
use to which this science most naturally lends itself. 
The demand for such assurance always seems to me to 
be, in some measure, a confession that life itself, with 
long years of friendship and affection, has not yielded 
that assurance as a kind of inner certainty which needs 
no further proof. There is something belated in this 
quest for comfort, as it were a tacit confession that the 
years of human communion had not granted the convic- ’ 
tion which they should have granted. I would prefer 
not to try to overtake, by thus plucking at the mystery, 


LIFE AFTER DEATH 131 


the failure of my own experience as friend and kins- 
man. And in the case of those whom I think I did come 
to know well and to love well, I would prefer to leave 
the matter there, with the sure memories and persua- 
sions which experience yielded. Personally I should be 
very loath to seek at the hands of a medium in trance, 
messages from my own dear dead. I should feel that 
somehow I was faithless to that which they gave me and 
were to me in life. In short, I shrink from the implica- 
tions of a furtive visit to the Cave of Endor. This may 
be an idiosyncrasy. I record it for what it is worth. 

The scientific attempt to solve the problem of the 
life after death is, then, a serious adventure of the 
human mind, as yet not having vindicated itself. But it 
does involve a serious moral question which concerns 
the actual technique of enquiry, and in the case of the 
lay sitter suggests failures in the world of normal 
human relationships which one is reluctant to retrieve 
by such dubious means. Better to accept the failure and 
still to hope, better still the deathless certainty of 
Browning’s Perspice in this experience of life with 
life. 

When we turn from science to revelation and faith we 
come into another realm altogether. 

There is, for Christians, first of all the fact of Easter. 
Without attempting to choose between the many inter- 
pretations of the fact, we are, I take it, agreed that the 
disciples were given on the first Easter Day assurance 
of the immortality of Jesus. If those experiences can- 
not be defined as ‘‘real,’’ whether having their origin 
in the world of outer matter or of inner consciousness, 
then the Christian religion rests upon a gross delusion. 
For myself I am content to affirm, in view of the con- 


182 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


flicting details in the Gospels, the essential reality of 
this experience, its witness to truth. 

Granted this, one may say: The matter is then set- 
tled, there is no room for further discussion; Christ 
being dead yet lives, and the immortality of man is thus 
pledged or assured. The curious thing about this argu- 
ment, however, is the fact that it carries no weight with 
those who do not care about Jesus and follow him. To 
the man who has no interest in Christianity the story of 
Haster is ‘‘an idle tale.’’ It is one of the countless 
incredible legends which religion seems always to be 
weaving. It is to such a one simply ‘‘a dead hypothe- 
sis,’’? awakening no interest or plausibility. 

This difficulty, however, is inherent in the whole 
situation. The striking fact about the record of the 
Haster appearances is the very natural but too often 
unnoticed restriction of those appearances to the im- 
mediate company of the disciples. There is no slightest 
intimation that Herod or Pilate or the Roman.soldiers 
ever ‘‘saw’’ Jesus again after He had been taken from 
the cross and laid away in the rock-hewn tomb. We are 
left on Friday with two or three women and one beloved 
disciple at the foot of the cross. When Easter dawns 
the figures of these women are the first figures whom 
we can discern, and they were the first to see the Risen 
Lord. Then the disciples, one after another, singly or 
in pairs, then the eleven, then all the brethren, perhaps 
five hundred, see Him. 

There is here a clear suggestion that some fitness or 
insight on the part of men determined who should 
‘‘see’? Him and who should not. This, after all, is what 
we should expect. The whole content of Easter belongs 
to the subtle world of religion, and not to the eruder 


LIFE AFTER DEATH 133 


world of material proof. You cannot leave the rest of 
the Gospels in the keeping of religion, but transfer 
Haster to the keeping of the physical sciences. Easter, 
supremely, belongs in the keeping of religion. And that 
means that it calls for the cooperation, the insight, and 
expectant attitude which are always the human contri- 
bution to that mystery which we term ‘‘revelation.”’ 
‘*Revelations’’ are given to persons who on the human 
side have fulfilled their part in the commerce of the 
‘spirit. This means, simply, that those who had really 
loved and followed Jesus knew His deathless life, but 
that to others no such certitude was given or could be 
given. What was true then is true now. 

Quite clearly, then, the persuasion of the immortality 
of Jesus is not something to be proved by balancing 
evidence or weighing records, in an attitude of disin- 
terested indifference. What most of us believe about 
that supreme affirmation we believe as the maturing 
conviction of: our own efforts to live a Christian life, 
and our discovery in experience of the nature and 
character of Christ. We do not believe in Him because 
He strikes us blind with some incredible magic, we be- 
lieve in the reality of all that Easter records because 
the life of discipleship matures in some such conclu- 
sion. 

The revelation of.the Christian hope, then, in so far 
as we are to receive it, is determined by the quality of 
our own discipleship. It calls for the insight of human 
devotion as the condition for its bestowal. Again, what 
was true.on the first Haster Day is still true, and there 
is no other way to any acceptance of its truth save the 
way of long and faithful following after Him. 

Let me turn, now, to two or three concluding con- 


184 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


siderations which, on our human side, do buttress our 
whole faith in the life after death and give it a reason- 
ableness which dignifies and confirms our native hope. 

There is, first of all, the moral struggle, and the 
inequality of human circumstance, amounting appar- 
ently to injustice. Kant was accustomed to say that if 
justice is not done, the whole foundations of being are 
removed. Science claims that justice is always done. 
‘“‘The ledgers of the Almighty,’’ says Huxley, ‘‘are 
strictly kept and every one of us has the balance of his 
operations paid over to him at the end of every minute 
of his existence.’’ This dogma is undoubtedly true, and 
yet it calls for much interpretation. In particular any 
such dogma of the inerrant justice of things demands 
that man shall be set in his whole social milieu, both as 
to heredity and environment. The problem of evil, and 
likewise the equally difficult but none the less baffling 
problem of good, is insoluble on the basis of any indi- 
vidualist ethic. We suffer for the mistakes and sins of 
others as we profit undeservedly by their labors and 
sacrifices. There is a kind of total justice in the experi- 
ence of the race, which no one questions. But it is never 
possible to close and balance the account of the indi- 
vidual with the race and with the moral order. Too 
many items are still unknown and outstanding. The 
ethical problem raised and stated so poignantly in the 
book of Job defies all solution if the single individual 
be treated as a self-sufficient moral entity. The deeper 
insight of the New Testament substitutes for this in- 
credible individualism its truer doctrine of the ‘‘mem- 
bers’’ and its world of penalty and grace in the whole 
experience of man in the life of the race. 

But even so, a full sense of a final justice demands 


LIFE AFTER DEATH 135 


that these mysteries, with all the unknown factors in 
experience, be made plain to the single man. It may 
comfort me to know that though I perish truth abides 
and goodness wins the day. But it cannot be a perfect 
triumph for me unless somehow I am conscious of the 
day of victory and share in it. A passionate conviction 
as to the triumph of good in the moral order demands 
that those who have fought the good fight, who have 
suffered in that fight and who have gone down still 
fighting when the cause was not yet won, should know 
and should share in the final victory. Less than this is 
less than justice and less than perfect goodness. The 
argument from moral experience confirms us in our 
faith that the moral man must know himself the final 
victor over his world. This knowledge in its fullness is 
never given to him in the present life. If it comes it can 
come only in a life after death. 

There is, in the next place, the persuasion as to the 
meaning and the value of life yielded by living. We are 
faithful to the deeper wisdom of experience if we say 
that persons are the most precious realities in the world 
and that the development of personality through its 
contacts with other persons seems to be the intention 
and meaning of the life-process. 

This judgment upon the meaning and value of life is 
at once a platitude and a profound truth. It is a plati- 
tude to those who take their world of men for granted. 
It is a truth to those who have learned by sincere and 
costly experience what matters most. What really mat- 
ters to us in the end is our world of men. The hardest 
blow which the world can deal us is the blow of sorrow, 
the loss of those who are near and dear to us. 

The poignancy of the fact of death lies not so much 


186 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


in work laid down before it is completed, or in the 
moral struggle relinquished before the victory is won, 
but in the interruption of friendship and affection. The 
deeper cry at the grave’s edge is not the cry of a 
thwarted moral sense, but of a desolated heart. 

Now living is simply a business of drawing nearer to 
other human beings or of drawing apart from them. We 
are penned in by the bars of individuality. We struggle 
to let down those bars, or to get past them and into 
other lives. Often we are thrown back into our solitary 
selves. But again and again we seem to get at our 
fellows with a kind of immediacy, and those hours when 
we find our true and whole self in the world of persons 
around us are the best hours in living. 

There is again, here, something which calls for fur- 
ther fulfilment. These experiences are prophetic of a 
fuller and larger personal life. Unless the whole con- 
tent of life is a chaos and a delusion, discovering no 
intention or end, and discouraging honest thought, we 
must hold that in the world of persons and the enlarge- 
ment of personal life through friendship and affection 
we have a clue which warrants us to think on into a life 
more fully personal. The alternative to such projection 
of immediate experience into the future is sheer irra- 
tionality. Neither the eternal hills nor the precious 
gems and gold of the earth are to be considered in dura- 
bility and worth beside the tough and precious world 
where ‘‘heart speaks to heart.’’ 

For that is the religious verdict upon the meaning 
and value of living. And when John Henry Newman 
was made Cardinal he chose those words as the motto 
for his arms, ‘‘Cor ad cor loquitur.’’ No other verdict 
upon experience or insight into living yields as much 


LIFE AFTER DEATH 137 


truth in the test of years as this. And if we follow 
Browning in his wholesome judgment, ‘‘Be sure that 
God ne’er dooms to waste the strength He deigns im- 
part,’’? we must find in this deathless power of the 
human heart to claim its own some pledge of that 
power’s full occasion and opportunity. Less than this 
is to make a mock of the love of man for woman and the 
love of man for man, passing the love of woman. It is to 
give the lie to life itself and the yield of living. Life 
here, then, is an experimental adventure in the escape 
from the solitude of individuality and in the discovery 
of the true self in union with other persons. Unless this 
life is an irrational and cruel joke this quest creates 
both the demand for its own fulfilment in some other 
world, and the hopeful assurance of that fulfilment. 

These considerations bring us on to the gospel of 
‘‘the eternal moment.’’ The modern doctrine of immor- 
tality, as I see it, is the assertion of the deathless qual- 
ity of certain experiences given us here and now, and 
not merely a dreary perpetuity for the monotonous 
drudgery of our lesser hours. George Tyrrell has 
pointed out the fact that the indefinite and infinite ex- 
tension of the humdrum life of every day is, for the 
Buddhist, a vision not of heaven but of hell. And 
Horace Bushnell once said of the preparation of an 
Haster sermon, that the idea of immortality too often 
awakens no response in our minds because it is pre- 
sented as the mere dreary prolongation of our common 
earthly life. This idea, he said, does not and cannot 
awaken enthusiasm and desire. What is demanded in 
our thought of heaven is a qualitative difference; not 
longer life but another kind of life. 

There is a sentence in Aristotle’s metaphysics which 


188 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


affirms that ‘‘Our rare best moments are like the life 
of God.’’ This is, of course, the doctrine of immortality 
found in the fourth Gospel. Eternal Life, as conceived 
in that Gospel, is not a matter of life after death 
merely, but rather a distinction in the levels of all living 
here or hereafter. According to that Gospel we do not 
have to wait until we are dead to become immortal. We 
may enter into eternal life here and now. For those 
times and occasions of major worth in our present liv- 
ing, when we are at one with God and man, are in them- 
selves eternal. Here and now we pass out of death into 
life. The clock ceases to register the passage of time, 
the movements of its hands have no significance, be- 
cause we live in some moment that seems immune from 
the corrosion of passing time. 

This is, of course, the mystic’s gospel of immortality. 
It seems to me to be, again, a clue as to the truth. We do 
have certain experiences which are qualitatively lifted 
above the discontent of our unfulfilled selves. In these 
experiences we feel deeply our oneness with all Being. 
Weare a part of that which Js. These eternal moments 
come to us from time to time in the presence of the 
beauty of nature, in the clear vision of some truth por- 
trayed by art, in human comradeships, in worship. 
These moments know their own times and seasons. But 
they are the hours when we live most fully and when 
life seems unending and indubitable. Now the whole 
idea of life after death concerns these present experi- 
ences of eternal life. They are what Paul might call an 
‘fearnest’’ of the true nature of immortality and give 
us immediate experience of a qualitative perfection of 
life. They constitute an immediate insight into the true 
conception of immortality. 


LIFE AFTER DEATH 139 


Finally, I have one personal impression to record, 
coming out of these past years of experience as a pas- 
tor. It falls to the lot of every minister, as of every 
doctor, to go with one man after another right up to the 
border line between the worlds. Dr. Osler has said that 
‘‘deathbeds’’ in themselves yield little suggestion as to 
what is beyond. Most men, at the very end, die quietly 
and all unconscious of the change. The minister has no 
other evidence to adduce from the actual moments of 
dying which he watches through. There is here a kind 
provision of nature which makes the actual ending of 
the average human life a matter of entire unconscious- 
ness or of dulled perception. 

But the minister sees many and many a human soul 
face the eventuality in full and clear consciousness and 
approach its rendezvous with death in a spirit of high 
courage. What remains out of my own impressions of 
pastoral work in this connection is a certain strong im- 
pression of an ‘‘over-soul’’ in man, something of spirit- 
ual energy still standing to the credit of these dead, 
an unexpended capacity for life which has not been 
exhausted. 

It is said of Jesus, in the traditional phrase, that He 
‘‘overcame’’ the grave. The figure is that of one ap- 
proaching death, not with reluctance and with waning 
powers, but of one sweeping up to the barrier between 
the worlds with such momentum that He overshot the 
grave which marks the boundary between the worlds, 
carrying on into another world. It is like a great wave 
that rolls up on a beach sweeping high above the mean 
level high-water mark. 

Many men and women, in dying, have left with me, 
their minister, this strong suggestion of ‘‘overcoming’”’ 


140 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


the grave. I have felt that although disease or accident 
or age have seemed to win a temporary victory, these 
persons came up to their end with a resilience, a capa- 
city for experience still unexhausted. They have given 
the clear suggestion of an inner and spiritual life that 
had not worn itself out. The principle and power of 
true life was still theirs. They were vital, active, affec- 
tionate, hopeful. I cannot think of them as dead, be- 
cause I must believe in some principle of conservation 
of energy and value in the universe. I must believe that 
energy undergoing degradation here is conserved and 
reincarnated elsewhere. What seems to be their loss 
here I must still carry on, in confident imagination, to 
their credit and capacity for living in another world. 

This pastoral persuasion, again and again renewed, 
until it has deepened into a conviction with me, I give 
you for what it is worth. The margins of the over-soul 
in the nature and character of good men dead, I must 
believe to be still at their use and hand elsewhere. 
There is still something left in the impression which 
these persons have made upon me, which creates in my 
thought of them that other world which gives their 
unspent strength and goodness its new occasion. This 
is not formal logic. It is, rather, one of those yields of 
a particular type of experience which has issued in ‘‘a 
passionate intuition.’’ You may match it with your own 
persuasion as to men of strength and virtue who have 
passed out of your own world. 

For the life of daily discipleship, then, there is no 
scientific proof of immortality. There is only the prac- 
tice of immortal life in the unremitting moral struggle, — 
in the world of persons seeking the true self of each 
and all, in the chance eternal moment, and in the wit- 


LIFE AFTER DEATH 141 


ness of those who being dead yet live in our memory 
and hope. Being a Christian yields such conviction as 
to Jesus. And the whole essence of Christianity is its 
assurance that what is true of Jesus is the ultimate 
truth of all human life. 





THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH 
IN MODERN SOCIETY 





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CHAPTER VIII 


THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH 
IN MODERN SOCIETY 


CHARLES W. GILKEY 


SIGNS are not wanting that the attitude of many seri- 
ous-minded modern men toward the Church, as toward 
religion in general, is beginning to change from one of 
criticism, or at best of indifference, to one of interested 
and often of sympathetic reconstruction. We have just 
come through a period when it has been the fashion 
everywhere to charge the Church with even more than 
her admittedly lengthy debit account of sins of omission 
and commission great and small: no editor, scholar, 
speaker, cartoonist, paragraph-writer, or even up-to- 
date preacher so blind as to do her reverence, and none 
so humble as to hesitate to tell her what she must do to 
save herself from impending shipwreck and abandon- 
ment on the sands of time. In an inimitable essay on 
‘*Heckling the Church’’ in the Atlantic Monthly for 
December, 1911, Dr. H. E. Fosdick said: 


A perusal of current literature in reference to the church 
reveals how much the.rage it has become to censure the blun- 
ders of organized religion. There are fashions in magazine 
articles as well as in dress, and the present vogue is, by any 
means, to drub the church. Recent essays in which, with force 
and cleverness, both friends and foes have pointedly remarked 
upon ecclesiastical failures . . . leave the impression, not only 
that there are grievous errors to be criticized, but that some 
people are having rare sport criticizing them. 


146 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


But since these words were written, many things 
have changed ; among them certainly, to some extent at 
least, the position of the Church in public opinion and 
regard. Dr. Fosdick’s point in this article—that the 
Church, as a very human institution, reveals the same 
common faults of our human nature that equally ap-_ 
pear in our politics, our industry, and our education— 
has been given further emphasis by the Great War, 
with its relentless revelation of these weaknesses as 
running through our entire social order. In fact, the 
balance has swung the least bit back the other way. 
America’s participation in the Great War, requiring 
as it did the prompt development of an intelligent and 
tenacious morale throughout the nation, showed the 
Church only less valuable than the press as an instru- 
ment for broadcasting information and appeal, and 
superior to any other agency in its moral authority and 
dynamic. So well have our civic and humanitarian 
enterprises learned this lesson, that nowadays a minis- 
ter’s office hours and daily mail are alike burdened with 
appeals to serve as publicity man for all kinds of good 
causes; and if he follow every philanthropic prescrip- 
tion for the subject of his next Sunday’s sermon, he will 
(as Dean Sperry also has pointedly observed in the 
Atlantic) have scarcely a Sunday in the year free on 
which to preach the gospel! 

For, as this situation clearly indicated, the Church 
has actually begun to awaken to some at least of her 
responsibilities: so suddenly, in fact, that to some of 
her present-day critics she seems to be moving very 
incaleulably and sometimes not quite sanely, like one 
who has just opened his eyes without yet recovering 
all his senses. It was only a decade ago that we heard 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY = 147 


much from labor leaders about the great gulf between 
the Church and the workingman, created by her failure 
to understand social wrongs and hopes, and by her 
complete financial dependence upon the prosperous 
whose gifts were usually as ill made as their gains were 
ill gotten. But (however it may still be between the 
Church and the workingman) much of the social criti- 
cism of the Church has, since the steel strike of 1919, 
come from quite the other side, on the ground that she 
has become far too radical for many of her supporters: 
much more is heard to-day about the rich reactionaries 
who are canceling their subscriptions as a protest, than 
about their tainted support of a class institution. 

But he who listens carefully to these contemporary 
solicitations and criticisms of the Church will easily 
detect under them the same note of social anxiety that 
sounds so often in modern life. In this chaotic, disinte- 
grating world into which the War has carried us, the 
Church is asked to be the custodian of many treasures 
beside her own pearl of great price. Mr. Babson calls 
on far-sighted business men to support her as a kind 
of universal moral fidelity and casualty assurance 
society. Mr. Wells finds the salvaging of civilization, 
and Lord Bryce the future of democracy, somehow 
bound up with the future of religion. Sir Philip Gibbs, 
scanning the horizon for signs of social hope, sees the 
brightest prospect in the direction of historic Chris- 
tianity. The British delegation goes home from Ver- 
sailles, the British prime minister from repeated break- 
downs in Huropean conferences, the Japanese ambassa- 
dor even from the Washington Conference, saying that 
the future hopes of men rest with religion. General 
Pershing is even more explicit, and also President 


148 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


Harding: the prevention of war, says the one, the sta- 
bility of society, says the other, depends ultimately 
upon religion as organized in the Church. 

The honest churchman may not be at all sure that 
the Church is yet ready to carry easily such large 
responsibilities as these. He looks over at the Funda- 
mentalist brother in a neighboring pew, and the heresy- 
hunter in a sister church; he reads the headlines of new 
theological controversy in the metropolitan press; he 
notes the apparent resurgence since the war of irrecon- 
cilable denominationalism in religion as well as irrecon- 
cilable nationalism in politics; he watches the tiny 
trickle of strong men entering the ministry, and the 
swelling stream of those who are leaving it; he puzzles 
and grieves over the slowness of the Church to sense 
the things that pertain to the world’s peace, and to 
proclaim them from the housetops as part of the gospel 
of Him at whose birth the tidings came, ‘‘Peace on 
earth to men of goodwill.’’ And yet withal he is encour- 
aged: by the conspicuous influence of the American 
churches in bringing about the Washington Conference ; 
by the new spirit moving in every great religious body ; 
by the great expansion of missionary intelligence and 
interest as well as of benevolent giving; by the better 
understanding that is steadily strengthening between 
religious, social, and educational leaders; and not least, 
by the response of the younger generation, and the 
quality if not the quantity of the younger ministry. The 
president of the University of Chicago came home from 
the Northern Baptist Convention at Indianapolis last 
June to say that the most heartening thing he had seen 
in years was not simply the unexpectedly complete 
victory of the spirit of tolerance and progress over 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY 149 


intolerance and reaction at what may well prove a 
turning point in American religious history; but even 
more the spirit and quality of the younger men in the 
ministry that had made that victory possible. The 
whole situation of the Church to-day, with its great 
opportunities and its obvious limitations, reminds one 
of that superb word of Paul, ‘‘A great door and effee- 
tual is opened unto me, and there are many adver- 
saries.”’ 

At such a time it is appropriate to face afresh the 
question of the function of the Church in human 
society, and to attempt to restate the reasons which 
justify her support and guarantee her future as a per- 
manent necessity among human beings endowed and 
organized as we are, and as our children will be after 
us. Especially is it timely, thus early in the new age 
into which modern science and industry and the modern 
social conscience have combined to lead us, to ask what 
special service the Church may render, and what pecul- 
iar opportunities and responsibilities confront her, in 
the characteristic conditions of the age in which we live. 
Our subject falls naturally, therefore, into two parts: 
one dealing with the permanent functions of the Church 
in human life, the other with her contemporary tasks 
in our modern time. 

It should be said also that in thus thinking of the 
Church we do not assume any presuppositions, his- 
torical or theological, as to what the Church is or ought 
to be, and that we do not use the word itself in any 
esoteric or technical sense. Questions of history, polity, 
and doctrine, that have bulked so large in most discus- 
sions of this subject, we waive entirely: important as 
they may be in other connections, they surely yield in 


150 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


urgency to the previous question which is on the lips 
of so many and in the hearts of more to-day: Whatever 
the Church’s past, what can she do in the living present, 
and has she any future? What we mean by the Church 
is what ordinary man means when he asks these ques- 
tions—a social group formed by the union of individual 
Christians for common worship and service. Whether 
this group be an informal company of Christians seek- 
ing fellowship with each other and with God through 
Jesus Christ, or an organized local congregation fed- 
erated with other such local groups into a denomina- 
tion, or whether it thinks of itself as a single national 
or international organization that is supreme over its 
local branches, matters not for our present purpose. It 
does matter, however, that we should remember that 
we are considering, not the fortunes or functions of 
religion in general, but those of the social institution 
which it has created for its own cultivation. That reli- 
gion is a permanent element in human nature and life 
may perhaps fairly be taken for granted among men 
who think on these things, and is assumed in this arti- 
cle. It is at least conceivable, however, as the theory of 
some radical Protestants seem to be, and as the practice 
of very many lukewarm church members seems to 
imply, that, while religion may abide, the Church has 
outlived its usefulness. Whether this is actually the 
case is precisely our question. 


I. Permanent Functions of the Church in Human Infe. 

In view of this social interdependence of all our 
higher life, the indispensable function of the Church ~ 
as a permanent necessity and support of the spiritual 
interests of human society becomes evident. As by com- 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY 151 


bining the limited strength or wisdom or capital of 
many individuals into an army or a council or a cor- 
poration, a collective achievement is made possible 
which no single person could have attempted; and as 
within such a social group standards of efficiency and 
attainment are maintained to which many of the weaker 
would not individually attain alone, so may a group of 
people with moral aspirations and Christian purposes 
pool, so to speak, their spiritual capital in a church, 
and draw on this common spiritual stock for support in 
times of their personal religious doubt or obscurity, or 
moral strain. That such spiritual support from the com- 
mon capital is a reality, let the experience of all who 
have found help in the public worship of the Church at 
times of individual need, or who have felt the steadying 
power of the Christian public opinion of the Church at 
times of moral strain, bear abundant witness. 

’ The number of us who at some time or other are kept 
from religious ‘‘backsliding’’ or moral lapse by the 
sustaining power of public opinion is perhaps, if we 
only knew, larger than we should like to think for the 
sake of the credit of individual human nature; but at 
least it shows how powerful and indispensable are the 
social sanctions that hold us in our proper places. The 
human universe, like the solar system and the whole 
cosmos of which itis a part, is held in place and swung 
in orderly and dependable orbit by the influence of its 
individual members on each other; gravitation is in 
this sense a spiritual as well as a physical force—and 
in both realms is fundamental and essential. The 
Church, in other words, has as its first permanent func- 
tion in human life the support of the otherwise morally 
and religiously insufficient individual in his higher life. 


152 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


In this sense, social and psychological rather than dog- 
matic, the Church may fairly be called an ‘‘ark of sal- 
vation’’ for struggling individual swimmers on the sea 
of spiritual experience. 

A second aspect of the Church’s function is closely 
related to this first. Not simply is the moral and reli- 
gious life of most men supported and stimulated by the 
common spiritual life of the Church; it is very often 
itself originated as an offspring from that life more or 
less directly. For it is true of spiritual life as of physi- 
eal, that it springs from previous life; religious experi- 
ence is quickened in one soul by and from the expe- 
rience of others, and moral resolve is fired by the 
example or exhortation of an inspiring character. Now 
while it is true that this creative contact of personali- 
ties is not seldom a matter of direct personal influence 
(‘personal work’’ is the traditional phrase) in which 
the Church as such has no share, it is also true that a 
great many people are not themselves directly in touch 
with any spiritually quickening personality of this sort, 
and can come into such life-giving contact only through 
the Church in which such personalities gather and are 
accessible. And not only so, but the Church herself, like 
any social organization, develops a corporate life of 
her own that is different from, and stronger than, the 
lives of her members individually or even in the aggre- 
gate. The ‘‘life of the Church”’ is a very real spiritual 
entity, as every live member of a living church knows. 
And this common or corporate life is often as potent 
as any individual influence to beget new life in others. | 
It is no accident that conversions usually take place in 
churches or as a direct result of church work, and at 
special times and seasons of spiritual travail of the 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY = 153 


common soul. Life from life is nature’s law; and the 
corporate as well as the individual spiritual life can 
bring forth and bear. 

Nor is it simply contemporary life that thus has 
power to reproduce itself. Vital spiritual experience 
has an astonishing quality of timelessness—it seems 
never to lose the power to quicken new life from itself. 
The experience and example of ancient ‘‘saints, apos- 
tles, prophets, martyrs’’ have almost as much power of 
inspiration over us as over their contemporaries and 
successors—and in many cases even more. The ‘‘life of 
the Church’’ thus becames much more than the aggre- 
gate of its component individual lives, more even than 
the corporate life which all these with each other 
create. It includes also in a very real sense the timeless 
experience of all those who, ‘‘having done the will of 
God, abide forever,’’ and likewise the accumulating or 
rather enlarging common life of the Church of all the 
ages. This ‘‘communion of saints’’ thus becomes a cor- 
porate life wider and deeper and mightier than that of 
any age or group, and able continually to call forth 
new life to reproduce and enrich itself. 

Abstract and intangible as this argument may per- 
haps seem, it appears as by no means unreal or invalid 
when we consider the history and experience of all the 
‘Catholic’? churches, and their sheer power to per- 
petuate themselves as imstitutions, with a minimum of 
the personal contact of individuals which Protestantism 
has always magnified. Still more does it so appear when 
we consider the relation of the Church to that greatest 
but one of all Christian sources and springs of religious 
experience—the Bible. 

The Bible as we have it is essentially a church book. 


154 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


Though not written for ecclesiastical purposes, it still 
remains true that it was collected, transmitted, pre- 
served, and interpreted, 7m the Church. In other words, 
this wonderful self-revelation of original Hebrew and 
Christian piety, this unique record of religious experi- 
ence, has been handed down to us in and through the 
Church, and is a kind of visible transcript of the spirit- 
ual life which the Church has always possessed and 
transmitted. And as the Bible has always been like an 
overflowing vessel of ‘‘living water,’’ ‘‘quick and 
powerful’? to call forth Christian experience and 
stimulate Christian living in the successive generations, 
so has the Church ever been the channel through which 
has poured down through the ages the inexhaustible 
stream from which the vessel was originally filled. 
Still more evident is this when we consider the rela- 
tion which the Church has always sustained to the 
most powerful of all sources of Christian life and ex- 
perience—the person of Jesus Christ. In His presence, 
in contact with His personality as it stands forth in 
the Gospels, the essential Christian experience is most 
steadily and surely produced: there God becomes real 
and fatherly and trustworthy, life becomes big with 
meaning and the promise of immortality, and the king- 
dom of heaven becomes a present task and a future 
hope. Now it is within the Church that His memory, 
His portrait, His teachings, His spirit, have been kept 
alive ; it is ‘‘where two or three are gathered together’’ 
in His name, that He is ‘‘in the midst.’’ Historically 
speaking, it was within the Church that the sayings of 
Jesus were first collected and treasured, and His biog- — 
raphies written, and there that through all the cen- 
turies since, however inadequately or distortedly at 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY 155 


times, He has been ‘‘lifted up’’ to the homage and obe- 
dience and imitation of mankind. Surely not least 
among the age-long services of the Church has been 
this: that it has held up before mankind steadily the 
most important figure in human history. And this 
remains in our time a permanent and indispensable 
function of the Church—for our age needs the vision 
of Christ certainly not less than those that have gone 
before. And so long as the Church, by its preaching and 
teaching and witness-bearing, thrusts the figure of 
Christ before the attention of men, not only in the 
sanctuary, but in the market-place, the school and the 
home, so long it is meeting the condition on which 
depends the contemporary fulfilment of His own an- 
cient and oft-verified promise, ‘‘I, if I be lifted up, will 
draw all men unto me.”’ 

In other words, the orthodox Catholic doctrine of the 
Church as the repository and guardian of an authorita- 
tive tradition is simply, as dogmas so often are, the 
theological perversion and intellectual incrustation of 
a spiritual experience. It is not tradition which the 
Church ought to treasure up and transmit, but laife— 
spiritual life. She becomes a channel through which the 
stream of Christian experience pours itself on down 
through the centuries, enriching itself and quickening 
new life as it goes, The Bergsonian philosophy, with its 
vivid and stimulating picture of life as a movement 
thrusting itself forward through real time into ever 
new and unforeseen individual manifestations, may 
help us moderns to make more real to ourselves this 
conception of the age-long life of the Church, and its 
relation to the individual lives of contemporary Chris- 
tians who are quickened by, or spring from it. The 


156 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


second permanent function of the Church is thus the 
transmission from generation to generation of Chris- 
tian life and experience in all its quickening power, and 
especially of those life-giving and never failing spirit- 
ual experiences which the Church has made accessible 
to the world in the Bible and in the person of Jesus 
Christ. 

A third aspect of the permanent function of the 
Church in human life appears when we consider the 
true relation of religion to the common affairs and 
routine of daily living in the average community. In 
time past, and in some types of Christianity to-day, 
religion has been apparently conceived as an occasional 
mysterious transaction or ritual act, which takes place 
at some special revival season or at some central and 
consecrated place, and by which the Divine is brought 
down into our human world to be adored and appro- 
priated. It is the descent of God within the reach of 
man. For all real Protestants, however, religion is no 
occasional transaction or rare ecstasy, but an ever 
renewed experience, attained through prayer and medi- 
tation and daily duty-doing and unselfish service, of 
the presence of the Divine in our hearts and lives in 
the midst of the affairs of every day. It is ‘‘the life of 
God in the soul of man’’—in whose transfiguring light 
nothing can be secular save what is sinful, and in whose 
purifying presence nothing worthy can remain common 
or unclean. 

At the same time, however, as we have seen, the 
average individual requires some social support, some 
objective and organized meditation, before he can catch © 
and keep this divine presence within him. And particu- 
larly is this true where the pressure of life’s daily 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY 157 


round and common task is forever tending to conceal 
or to extinguish the light within. In this regard the 
Church serves as a kind of constant conductor of the 
divine life and presence into the midst of every com- 
munity, and into the heart of every member. Not simply 
at some central shrine, but into the midst of every least 
community where ‘‘two or three are gathered to- 
gether,’’ she brings the common vision of Christ, the 
common experience of God. No spot on earth where two 
souls can meet for worship is so isolated, no house is so 
humble or service so barren or preacher so ill equipped 
or poor, as to miss this spiritual blessing if only the 
seeking be sincere; and by this blessing the common 
life and labor of these seekers and that community may 
be lit up with the very presence of God. And this sancti- 
fying and transfiguring ministry of the Church is not 
simply universal, but also constantly recurrent. Were 
it only once a month or once a year, the fire might 
languish and die in the long intervals. But once or twice 
or thrice a week the social bond is renewed, the com- 
mon aspiration is lifted, the common blessing comes. It 
is as important that this social mediation of religion 
should be constantly repeated so as to touch and trans- 
figure the constantly renewed and ever fresh pulses or 
periods of time that, as Bergson reminds us, make up 
life, as that it should touch every least and last locality 
where men live together. 

We may perhaps illustrate this third aspect of the 
function of the Church by the analogy of the produc- 
tion of steam. A ritualistic or revivalistic religion, like 
the old-fashioned boiler, brings the divine fire down to 
the outside of the undifferentiated mass of human life, 
and by the application of its heat there seeks to gener- 


158 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


ate power. But the mass is slow to penetrate and stub- 
born to transform by any such purely external method. 
It is the function of the Church to serve as the intricate 
system of channels in the modern tubular boiler, each 
local church acting as a single tube and all together ~ 
carrying the divine fire straight to the heart and out 
through all the ranges of human life, till spiritual 
power is generated everywhere at once. Only so can the 
kingdom come in all parts and at all times of our 
human experience. It is thus the third function of the 
Church to relate religion vitally to the ordinary life of 
all sorts and conditions of men, at all times and places 
of their existence. 

A fourth aspect of the function of the Church in 
human life can perhaps be stated more simply and 
directly than the three thus far considered. It is that a 
task so vast and intricate as that to which Christianity 
summons its followers—the bringing in on earth of 
God’s kingdom and the doing of His will among men— 
can be adequately attempted, much less accomplished, 
only by an organized society. All the considerations of 
efficiency which have led to the modern elaboration of 
organization in all departments of life require a like 
measure of organized efficiency on the part of the 
Church if she is to accomplish her task; and in propor- 
tion as her task is vaster, more delicate, and more 
difficult than that of manufacturing and marketing a 
commercial product, or administering a city or a state, 
or waging a war, must her organization be not less but 
more efficient. The necessity of a permanent machinery . 
that shall survive the individual fortunes of short-lived 
mortals; of a division of labor that shall assign each 
member to the tasks that he can best perform; of a 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY 159 


central administration that shall eliminate waste and 
duplication, and bring her full resources to bear on the 
most important tasks in hand; and of a constant super- 
vision and training that shall increase the efficiency of 
each worker; these necessities of every undertaking 
that would accomplish great things through human in- 
strumentality are laid upon the Church as well. 

But there remains a yet deeper reason why the Chris- 
tian task can be adequately attempted only by a 
society ; a reason which our High-Church friends have 
been far quicker to see and appropriate than we still 
individualistic ‘‘sectarians.’’ It is, briefly, that the 
Christian ideal for human life is a social ideal, the 
Christian gospel a social gospel; and that therefore 
this ideal can be realized, this gospel effectively 
preached, only through a society. If it be true, as we 
certainly think it is, that our present social order is 
fundamentally un-Christian, and that our Christian 
task is not finished until it as well as the individuals 
who compose it be redeemed, and the ‘‘environment 
evangelized’’ as well as the souls that are constantly 
exposed to its influence; then, by the same fundamental 
logic that makes it impossible that a man drowning out 
of reach of shore or boat should be rescued by anyone 
who cannot swim himself, or that an attacking fleet 
should ever be captured or destroyed by a defending 
army, it follows that this social task requires a social 
instrument, a Church, for its achievement. Just as in 
any highly organized sport a number of picked-up indi- 
viduals, however brilliant, can hardly hope to defeat a 
real ‘‘team,’’ so no mere aggregation of individuals, 
however saintly, can hope to overcome the ‘‘kingdoms 
of this world’’ and make them ‘‘the kingdoms of our 


160 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


Lord and of his Christ.’’ As a means to the establish- 
ment of an era of brotherhood and justice and mutual 
service, we must have a Church that is founded on, and 
characterized by, these same fundamental Christian 
principles: no other type of Church can ever achieve 
the kingdom, nor can it be achieved without any church 
at all. The fourth permanent function of the Church 
is therefore a cooperative attempt to realize an essen- 
tially social ideal. 

It will be observed that these four functions are after 
all simply various aspects of what is fundamentally a 
single or at most a two-sided fact—the social nature of 
all human life, and the correspondingly inevitable 
social character of all religion and notably of the Chris- 
tian religion. From this elemental fact follows directly 
the permanent necessity of the Church in human life; 
and all analyses or elaborations of its functions (of 
which many more might be made) and all analogies of 
its working (of which those above are offered as sug- 
gestive merely) are really only recognitions from vari- 
ous approaches of the ultimate fact that ‘‘no man liveth 
to himself,’’? but that ‘‘we are all members one of 
another.”’ 


II. Special Functions of the Church in Modern Society. 

While these permanent functions of the Church thus 
inhere in the fundamental characteristics of human life 
always and everywhere as we know it, and are thus the 
real basis of the Church’s abiding destiny, it is also 
true that in any age there may be special conditions 
urgently needing just what the Church has or ought to 
have to give, and challenging her to press with special 
vigor one or another of these functions, or even to add 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY 161 


to them others that the needs of the times or the nature 
of her own ideals demand. That this is notably true of 
our own time, that the Church is to-day facing at once 
a serious crisis and a great opportunity, has become a 
commonplace. Indeed, there is danger that the very 
recognition of our peculiar modern situation may lead 
us to an overemphasis on the differences between our 
own time and earlier ages, and to an obscuring of the 
permanent needs of human life which the Church, now 
as always, must meet. The modern man is after all not 
so different at heart from his ancestors as some very 
up-to-date thinkers would have us believe. The modern 
world greatly needs to ponder the dictum of Goethe— 
‘‘Mankind is forever advancing, but man remains ever 
the same’’—and the modern Church, in her eagerness 
to meet the new needs of mankind, must not cease to 
minister to the perennial needs of man. 

At the same time, there is no doubt that the Church 
is facing in our time a situation, fraught at once with 
crisis and with opportunity, such as rarely in her his- 
tory she has had to meet. It has become trite to say that 
‘conditions have changed,’’ so that her traditional 
methods of doing the very work which we have insisted 
is her permanent function are no longer effective, and 
that she must either find new methods or leave her 
essential task undone. This is unquestionably true. But 
further it is also true that certain temporary functions 
which, under the peculiar exigencies of past ages, she 
then assumed because no one else was doing them, and 
because they were related to her own ideals, have since 
been taken over by other agencies created for the pur- 
pose, leaving her without the prestige which once these 
activities brought her. As everybody knows, she has 


162 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


thus handed over education to public schools and pri- 
vate colleges, eleemosynary work very largely to chari- 
table organizations and to the state, and direct social 
reform to political parties. And yet once more: it is 
also true that certain characteristic changes in our 
modern life have deeply affected her work and con-— 
siderably increased its present difficulty. Modern 
science, philosophy, and historical scholarship have 
completely changed men’s ideas of the universe and of 
their own relation to it, and have modified profoundly 
the form, if not the substance, of all religious teaching. 
Out of the resulting period of theological transition 
and religious confusion we have by no means passed. 
And the increased complexity and high tension of mod- 
ern life have made it increasingly difficult for the 
Church to get the ear of men, and to find sufficient op- 
portunities to exercise to any perceptible extent an 
influence which must be as delicate and subtle as hers. 
But these facts, as at least the younger generation of 
our time are beginning to recognize, constitute a chal- 
lenge to advance rather than an excuse for retreat. 
They call for aggressive leadership to discover new 
methods of doing these perennial tasks in the midst of 
a new age. They require constructive thinking to re- 
state the ancient truths of Christianity in such new 
forms as to command even modern attention. And no 
less do they demand a realignment of our forces: the 
withdrawal of our energies from certain points of 
assured victory on humanity’s wide battlefield where 
we are no longer so much needed; the concentration of 
our forces at certain newly crucial points where the 
issue is still doubtful; or the seizing of some vantage 
points where the fighting has hardly yet begun. If there 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY = 1638 


were special opportunities for service in previous ages 
where the Church could win great prestige and strike 
mighty blows for the advance of the kingdom, by 
espousing causes and upholding interests which others 
were leaving to defeat, surely there must be such spe- 
cial opportunities in an age so tossed in tradition and 
torn with conflict as our own. Are there such, and if so, 
what are they? That is our second great question. 

The first great opportunity and challenge offered to 
the Church by distinctly modern conditions grows out 
of the new industrialism into which the last century has 
carried us. The development of machinery and of the 
factory system, the division of labor, the concentration 
into cities, and, above all, the enormous increase in the 
volume of our American wealth due to the exploitation 
of our unrivaled natural resources, have combined to 
emphasize business standards of success until they 
have become the accepted standards for the measure- 
ment of values of all kinds among us; and commercial- 
ism has come in upon us like a flood. The absence of a 
leisure class and of a landed aristocracy, with their 
traditions, has favored this process. Prosperity rather _ 
than human welfare has become our national ideal, all 
things material or immaterial are estimated in terms of 
money value or cost (witness our newspaper headlines 
which describe everything from building sites to paint- 
ings and opera singers by a figure with a $ before it), 
and we tremble to take any great forward step in social 
progress for fear of its possible effects on business and 
profits. The rich are our national heroes of success, our 
aristocracy is one chiefly of wealth, and the eyes of all 
of us are focused on money making as the one univer- 
sally recognized road to recognition—for a man is 


164 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


known among us by the money he has made. A keen 
observer recently remarked that as a nation we were 
working all day to make money and then sitting up half 
the night to spend it—and that this seemed to be all 
there was to most of our personal lives. Small wonder 
is it that rich and poor among us have had their stand-_ 
ards frightfully externalized, their sense for things 
unseen and eternal deadened, and their unresponsive- 
ness to spiritual interests greatly increased, by this all- 
invading commercialism. The marked reaction of the 
last few years against all this has come none too soon, 
and may well go much farther before the balance is 
restored in our national life between material and 
spiritual interests. 

The attention given to things spiritual in our 
national life is further lessened by the marked speeding 
up of the pace of modern living. In some industries the 
standard pace of labor has, by means of speeding up 
the machinery, been actually doubled by count in the 
last few years. The distinguished economist in charge 
of the Pittsburgh Survey reported: ‘‘The mass of 
workers in the steel industry are driven as large num- 
bers of laborers, whether slave or free, have scarcely 
before in human industry been driven.’’ And this 
speeding up has been felt all through our modern life, 
in our leisure and our amusements (witness the effects 
of the automobile) hardly less than in our industries. 
The result has been to make it increasingly difficult to 
get the attention of people—particularly the continuous 
attention. Nor is this to be wondered at when we re- 
member how jaded this pace of modern life must leave 
nerves and minds and bodies that have been driven all 
the working-day at this high speed. Busy men, and 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY 165 


women too for that matter, are very often too tired in 
the evening for anything but the lightest reading or the 
most trivial amusement, and on Sunday for anything 
but a trip into the country. This increased pace of 
modern life, instead of leaving more leisure for higher 
interests, is thus making it more and more difficult to 
fasten the attention of busy men on anything serious 
outside that which occupies their working hours. 

In such a largely commercialized and highly driven 
life, it is perhaps more than ever in human history an 
all-important function of the Church to witness to the 
reality and power of things unseen and eternal, and to 
make the busy modern man, whether capitalist or 
laborer, realize their supreme importance. She must 
insist that it profits neither a man nor a nation any- 
thing to gain the whole world and lose its own soul; 
that a man’s or a nation’s life consisteth not in the 
abundance of the things which it possesseth; that it is 
not the will of our Father in heaven that one of His 
little ones, whether overworked in cotton mills, or 
stifled in tenements, or starved in poverty, or corrupted 
with vice, should perish; that the moral order and an 
eternal destiny and God are the ultimate and supreme 
realities of existence. The Church must deliver herself 
from the insidious taint of commercialism, and fight 
uncompromisingly against the worship and service of 
Mammon wherever it appears. She must make con- 
science, both individual and social, vocal and authorita- 
tive in the lives and affairs of men and of communities. 
She must open to driven and distraught souls, out of 
the possible gloomy treadmill of their daily life, a win- 
dow toward heaven. In short, she must recognize it as 
a part of her distinctive modern task, by insisting on 


166 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


the infinite worth of the individual and the eternal 
values of brotherly human relationships, to ‘‘spiritual- 
ize democracy’’; for if democracy is not spiritualized, 
it may too easily become a vast social machine for 
greater economic efficiency and greater personal grati- 
fication. The social possibilities opening before a truly 
spiritualized democracy are tremendous; but a com- 
mercialized aristocracy and a brutalized proletariat 
would make up a society that in the long run could pro- 
duce and exalt little but mediocrity, superficiality, and 
frivolity. Away from such perils and toward such possi- 
bilities of democracy it is the present duty of the 
Church to lead our modern life. 

A second special opportunity for the Church in our 
age and nation grows out of the fact that we Americans 
are as a people deeply individualistic. It is one of the 
main secrets of our national strength and achievement 
that we have been so; and all the conditions of our 
pioneer history have tended to accentuate this national 
characteristic. But now that the pioneer stage of our 
development is largely past, and the industrial era is 
full upon us, it is absolutely essential, not only for our 
future attainments, but also for our future salvation as 
a people, that we should outgrow the individualism of 
our national youth wherein it was ‘‘every man for him- 
self and the devil take the hindermost,’’ and enter into 
the brotherly cooperation of maturity wherein we shall 
all recognize and act on the principle that we are all 
‘‘members one of another.’’ This is, of course, not 
socialism in the economic or political sense; it is social-, 
ism only in the sense of the organic unity of society in 
which Christianity is fundamentally socialistic, and 
every developed nation must also be if it is to survive. 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY 167 


Now it is surely one of the most hopeful auguries of 
our national future that this sense of our organic unity, 
which is at least the first stage of a growing sense of 
brotherhood, is increasing so rapidly among us; that a 
social conscience is developing which feels keenly the 
burden of our national sins and shortcomings and will 
not rest satisfied till they are overcome; and that a 
common will is asserting itself which alone can carry 
us forward as a united democracy on the path of social 
progress. 

But hopeful as are these beginnings, we yet have far 
to go. The forces of reactionary individualism are still 
mighty among us, and have on their side, not only the 
settled social habits and institutions of generations, 
but also the letter and even sometimes the spirit of our 
system of laws and our written constitutions. The rapid 
tendency to class stratification and increased class ten- 
sion among us as the glaringly unequal distribution of 
wealth increases at a pace accelerated by our enor- 
mously enlarging production of wealth, and the emerg- 
ence among our increasingly heterogeneous population 
of strong racial cleavages and antipathies, are cen- 
trifugal social forces which must be counteracted and 
overcome by stronger centripetal forces of social cohe- 
sion and brotherhood, if we are to survive as a democ- 
racy. ; 

Further, the social agencies which we have so far 
developed exist chiefly either for their own self-seeking 
(as in the case of labor unions, commercial organiza- 
tions, and fraternal orders) or for some specific piece 
of social betterment (as with our societies for particu- 
lar philanthropic and charitable purposes or for special 
objects of reform). In other words, while we are organ- 


168 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


izing rapidly into more or less sharply competing 
groups, each for mutual benefit within itself, and while 
we are attending admirably to the achievement of spe- 
cific reforms as the need for them appears, we are leay- 
ing the general social sense and conscience among us to © 
develop by itself without definite cultivation. That it 
does develop as a by-product of these specific social 
strivings is undoubted; that in these modern days God 
is causing it to spring forth and grow among us, ‘‘we 
know not how,’’ some of us firmly believe. But is it not 
also plain that the development of the social sense and 
conscience in general, the deepening of the realization 
that we human beings and we American fellow citizens 
are really ‘‘members one of another,’’ cannot be left to 
chance, to incidental by-production, or even to a kind 
Providence, if our social perils are to be averted and 
our social possibilities as the world’s great experiment 
in democracy are to be realized? 

It is this same problem in its international even more 
than in its social aspect which the War has made the 
very crux of our civilization. For the first time in 
human history thoughtful men are putting the question 
whether our civilization may not perish by the very 
instruments it had created for its self-defense,—like 
Saul falling on his own sword. Every man who thinks 
fundamentally on that great issue of the New Year and 
the coming years works through, from whatever ap- 
proach, to the same central conclusion, that the only 
solution is the spread of the ‘‘international mind’’— 
and heart. Thus slowly and laboriously—and at such | 
cost—do we discover in experience the truth of the 
angels’ promise ‘‘Peace on earth—to men of good 
will.”? 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY 169 


Now what has been not only the mission but the 
achievement of Christianity from its very beginning to 
create such international-mindedness? Paul reported 
its early success when he wrote to the Colossians: 
‘Where there is neither Greek nor Jew, . . . Barba- 
rian, Scythian, bond nor free.’’ From that day to this 
the Christian Church has in some real sense trans- 
cended all bonds of race and station, till it is to-day the 
most international as well as the most democratic of 
human associations. And the modern missionary enter- 
prise, with all its inadequacies, is a world-wide school 
of international-mindedness on the highest levels of 
human intercourse. Wherever at a country cross-road 
the missionary sewing circle meets (no matter how 
provincial their gossip as they sew), their spiritual 
horizon is being stretched beyond the oceans: wherever 
children bring their pennies to Sunday school to keep 
the little Russians and Armenians alive, a sense of 
interest and responsibility is being formed that will 
bear its fruit in the international relationships of the 
next generation. If the seeds of present war were sown 
generations ago, the seeds of future peace must be 
planted now. And the world-wide Christian Church is 
doing just that. 

Here, then is the second and perhaps the supreme 
opportunity of the Church in the peculiar conditions 
of modern life—to cultivate and sensitize the social 
conscience. She alone among all our human institutions 
exists for the specific purpose of making men realize 
that they are all brothers, children of a common Father 
in one great human family. Her public worship in itself 
is or ought to be a tremendous force working for this 
end; intercessory prayers for the special needs of 


] 
170 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


‘‘all sorts and conditions of men’’ must stir in the heart 
and conscience of every true worshiper, in the most 
searching and appropriate way that human experience 
knows, the realization of human brotherhood in com- 
mon dependence upon God; sermons, if they be in 
any true sense prophetic, must arouse the social con- 
science, and exalt the common weal, and utter forth 
again the ancient summons of Christianity to individual 
repentance for the sake of the general good—‘‘change 
your life, for God is introducing among men a new 
order.’’ And all the Church’s work and ‘‘labor of love,’’ 
ameliorative, redemptive, missionary, tends or ought 
to tend to deepen this sense of brotherhood to the ends 
of the earth. That the Church often fails in this divine 
mission, that her social service is sometimes neutral- 
ized by her own too frequent unbrotherliness, is no 
refutation of her function, but rather an evidence both 
of its importance and of its difficulties. She is herald 
and ambassador—and most of all the ministering ser- 
vant—of that kingdom of God which is ‘‘not meat and 
drink, but righteousness and peace and joy in the divine 
Spirit.’’ 

And this leads directly and specifically to the third 
great opportunity of the Church in the modern age— 
the definite promotion of the common welfare at the 
next point to be gained. In previous ages the Church 
has not been slow to undertake specific tasks which she 
saw lay along the pathway to her spiritual ideals, and 
which others were not undertaking. Thus in ancient 
times she undertook the whole work of relieving the ~ 
poor and caring for the sick and disabled, which in our 
more advanced stage of social evolution the state has 
taken over. Thus in the Dark Ages she undertook the 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY pid 


preservation of classical literature and the cultivation 
of science, philosophy, music, and art. Thus in our own 
land she has been an indispensable pioneer in the pro- 
viding of education and the establishing of law and 
order. But now that in the course of social development 
these specific tasks have been measurably completed, 
or taken over by other more appropriate and adequate 
agencies, it is for her, not to lament over lost prestige 
or outworn opportunities, but to press forward to meet 
the new needs of a new age. 

That the Church has not wholly lost her ancient ini- 
tiative, that she is not wholly blind to the new situation, 
let the whole recent development of institutional and 
neighborhood church work in the neediest part of the 
cities, of redemptive agencies for down-and-out men 
and unfortunate women, of activities for social outlook 
and uplift in the country church—let the whole intri- 
cate machinery of such efficient ‘‘arms of the Church’’ 
as the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian 
Associations—be at least partial evidence. Amid the 
spiritual darkness of Asia and Africa to-day the 
Church is doing exactly the same pioneering work for 
civilization and education and the medical relief of 
human suffering, which she did for Europe in the Mid- 
dle Ages and for America in its earlier days. Along 
these lines, at home and abroad, her distinctive and 
immediate tasks clearly lie at the present time. It is 
always hers to undertake promptly such specific tasks 
as lie in the direction of her ideals and are not other- 
wise being performed. 

When changing conditions, advancing social prog- 
ress, or the development of more adequate and appro- 
priate social machinery make it advisable for her to 


172 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


change her methods, or to turn over to others any of 
these temporary functions, she should do so without 
hesitation or discouragement—and press on to new and 
unoccupied points of social conflict or conquest. Even 
if, in the rapidly increasing complexity of our social — 
machinery, she should at any moment find all the spe- 
cial social issues of the hour in the hands of organiza- 
tions formed for these specific purposes, it would still 
be her important function to educate public opinion on 
these same issues, and to rally it in reinforcements that 
will ensure victory at the precise points where the con- 
temporary conflict is hottest. And always, above and 
beyond these changing tasks of the day, will remain 
those permanent functions in human life which alone 
would justify and require her existence. The Church, 
in short, is or ought to be at any moment the most sen- 
sitive and responsive part of the body politic—the 
keenest surface of its conscience to feel the newest 
social danger, the strong cutting edge of its common 
will to press through obstacles on to higher social 
attainments. She is or ought to be a permanently organ- 
ized force of social minute-men, ready to rush into any 
unexpected breach in the walls of our civilization and 
to hold it temporarily against the invading enemies of 
our human welfare until new defenses can be built; 
ready, too, to dart ahead and seize any commanding 
points of social vantage that will facilitate or protect 
the advance of humanity on its long march to better 
and higher things. 


Conclusions. 
It is evident that these special duties of the Church 
in modern life are simply concrete applications to con- 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY 173 


temporary social conditions of the permanent functions 
of the Church in human society which were earlier con- 
sidered. This recognition raises the question whether it 
may be possible to summarize the entire discussion in 
terms of a comprehensive definition or analogy. The 
latter is perhaps the wiser quest to follow; since in a 
subject so vast and vague as this, concrete analogies 
that are at all accurate are often more illuminating and 
suggestive than any abstract definitions. 

It happens that the course of social evolution has 
provided us with an analogy in a sphere close enough 
to be accurate, familiar enough to be illuminating, and 
practical enough to be suggestive. During the last seven 
centuries the colleges and universities of the modern 
world have become, more largely perhaps than any 
other institutions, the custodians of the higher life and 
interests of humanity. Within them the flame of pure 
scholarship and original research is kept alive. They 
train and develop thousands upon thousands of imma- 
ture personalities to be worthy members in the ‘‘fellow- 
ship of educated men’’—and this training is their pecu- 
liar and permanent function. But in addition they also 
give a partial or complete technical training for par- 
ticular callings; they are constantly making new dis- 
coveries in applied science, or advancing new principles 
of social well-being, which are at once put to the service 
of society in practical life; and they are always centers 
and rallying-points for patriotism and public spirit. 
Their multitudes of alumni throughout the world look 
back each to his Alma Mater with a loyalty and affec- 
tionate devotion which has few if any counterparts in 
human life, for each man recognizes how incalculable 
is his debt. The alumni of each college, or of all the 


174 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


colleges together, are, however, only a part of that 
great ‘fellowship of educated men’’ of all ages and 
races, who are bound together by common intellectual 
interests, ideals, and purposes into an invisible and 
organized but most real society. But though the colleges — 
do not train all these truly educated men, they are in- 
comparably the best and surest schools in which stu- 
dents may qualify themselves to enter this timeless 
fellowship. | 
What the college is to the intellectual life of the 
world, that the Church is or ought to be to its moral 
and religious life. She has always kept the flame of 
social altruism and of spiritual devotion burning 
bright. Under her molding and inspiring influence pass 
thousands upon thousands of immature souls, to be 
shaped into Christian men and women—and this is her 
peculiar and permanent function. That so many of 
these are women and children is to a far-seeing eye a 
sign not of her weakness but of her glory and her op- 
portunity—for these are the mothers and the members 
of the coming generation. But while it is the chief and 
central ‘‘business of the Church to make Christians,’’ 
she may and ought at the same time to enlist and train 
and organize workers for particular social tasks, to 
serve society in all possible practical ways, and to take 
the lead in all spiritual and social advance. Her mem- 
bers and beneficiaries owe her a loyalty and devotion 
commensurate with the spiritual blessings she has con- 
ferred upon them and upon their fellows. But all the 
members of these visible churches are only a part of. 
that great fellowship of spiritually- and socially-minded 
men of all the generations, who in their relations with 
each other and with God their Father constitute the 


THE CHURCH IN MODERN SOCIETY = 175 


invisible but most real kingdom of heaven. He who 
would qualify himself for entrance into that kingdom 
can best do so within the fellowship of the Church. For 
she is the spiritual Alma Mater of humanity, training 
men on earth for the eternal fellowship of the kingdom 
here and hereafter. 





CHRISTIANITY AND INTERNATIONAL 
RELATIONS 


f 


ROBERT E. SPEER 


Secretary Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions. 
President Federal Council of Churches of Christ wn 
America. Author, Lecturer, World Traveler. 


CHAPTER IX 


CHRISTIANITY AND INTERNATIONAL 
RELATIONS 


ROBERT E. SPEER 


SOME time ago an old friend, Professor Lang, of the 
University of Alabama, told me a curious incident of 
which he had been a witness. It occurred in the city of 
Hdinburgh, in the winter of 1909, when Professor Lang 
was there taking postgraduate work in the university. 
One day, he said, he noticed on one of the billboards of 
the university the advertisement of a lecture which was 
to be delivered that evening in McKwen Hall, the great 
hall of the university, by Mr. Arthur Balfour, as he was 
then, on the subject, ‘‘The Moral Values Which Unite 
the Nations.’’ Professor Lang said that of course he 
was not voing to miss such an opportunity, and as 
early as possible he went around to the hall and got a 
seat in the front row of the first balcony. In the 
moments before the lecture began, he looked about over 
the audience and saw sitting immediately opposite him 
on the front row of the balcony on the other side a 
Japanese student, whom he recognized as also engaged 
in graduate work in the university. Mr. Balfour was 
introduced in due time and went through with his lec- 
ture. It was just such a masterly presentation as any- 
one would have anticipated from that speaker of the 
different ties that bind together the peoples of the 
world, common knowledge, common commercial inter- 
ests, the intercourse of diplomatic relationship, and the 


180 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


bonds of human friendship. The speaker sat down amid 
a great outburst of applause. After the applause had 
died down, in the moment of silence when, after the 
Scotch fashion, the presiding officer had arisen to make 
his own little address of appreciation, Professor Lang 
said he saw this Japanese student stand up and lean 
over the balcony. Before the chairman could open his 
lips, the Japanese student had spoken. ‘‘But, Mr. Bal- 
four,’’ said he, ‘‘what about Jesus Christ?’’ Professor 
Lang said that one could have heard a pin drop in 
the hall. Everybody felt at once the justice of the 
rebuke. The leading statesman of the greatest Chris- 
tian empire in the world had been dealing with the dif- 
ferent ties that are to unite mankind and had omitted 
the one fundamental and essential bond. And everyone 
felt, too, the dramatic element in the situation, that the 
reminder of his forgetfulness had come to him from a 
Japanese student from a far-away non-Christian land. 
“‘But, Mr. Balfour, what about Jesus Christ?’’ 

Now we are to answer the Japanese student’s ques- 
tion. There is one great affirmation of St. Paul, which, 
in the field of thought with which Mr. Balfour was 
dealing. ‘‘The head of every man is Christ.’’ In other 
words, the solution of the international problem is just 
the same as the solution of every problem, nothing else 
than Jesus Christ. 

In St. Paul’s great declaration, it seems to me we get 
right to the heart of the issue. Here he is setting forth 
the principle of human unity and the necessity to man- 
kind of the instrumentalities through which its common . 
life is to be expressed and by which its common work is 
to be done. He sets himself, of course, over against great 
and common opinions that govern the thought of many 


7 


INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 181 


men in our day. We have been living for a good many 
years now under a conception of mechanistic national- 
ism, to which the idea of human unity is a very strange 
and alien thing, and as that rather hard and barren 
conception has been somewhat broken up in these last 
few years, it has been replaced by an equally noxious 
idea that applies the old evolutionary conceptions to 
human life in their very crudest form and conceives the 
history of the world to-day to be what it is alleged it 
has ever been, just one long, bitter jungle struggle for 
the survival of the fittest among the nations and the 
races and one unending conflict and rivalry among the 
environs for dominance and supremacy. 

Of course, one cannot reconcile these theories with 
the actual facts of life, for there is no such struggle 
as this between the races and peoples, and there is no 
such bitter jungle rivalry as this dominating the spirit 
of mankind. It is good to offer against these notions 
that have control of modern, practical international 


_ politics, the far richer and truer conception of St. Paul. 


Little by little, we are making our way into the heart 
of that conception. We are beginning to realize the 
economic solidarity of mankind, that there is no such 
thing as a conflicting economic interest among the 
nations that does not mean in the end some common 
loss. We realize now that no nation permanently can 
gain if other nations permanently have to suffer as 
the compensation for its gain, that human trade must 
be balanced and compensatory, that we cannot make 
money out of other‘nations endlessly unless they make 
money also and equally out of us, that we are all bound 
together in one great economic body. 

I remember how vividly the apprehension of this 


182 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


came home to me just after the war had begun, when I 
had gone out in part to see what the effects of the war 
might be in the far-off ends of the earth. We were mak- 
ing our way through the jungles of central Siam. The 
British engineers had secured the concession to build 
a railway from Bangkok south through the whole spine ~ 
of the Malay Peninsula to the cities of Penang and 
Singapore, and the German engineers had secured the 
concession to build the railway north from Bangkok 
to the frontiers of Yunnan in southern China. We were 
making our way up through the jungle and came at last 
to the railhead, where a little group of German engi- 
neers were still busy, Siam not having yet come in on 
the side of the Allies in the War. The German engineers 
were trying to master a river that ran right across the 
line of their northward advance. They had, of course, 
been getting their materials from home, just as the 
British engineers had done—that is where the profit 
of the concessions lay—and now there was, of course, 
no possibility of getting out any more building mate- 
rial from Germany and in bridging this new river the 
German engineers had to do the best they could with 
what they had on hand. It happened that down the line 
there was a bridge no longer needed over the stream 
for which it had been built. They brought that bridge 
up and inasmuch as it would not fit the northern river 
they changed the size of the river to fit the bridge. Far 
off there in the heart of the jungle, the German engi- 
neers were changing the topography of a Siamese river 
because of the necessities of the great struggle ten 
thousand miles away. We were buried in the heart of | 
the great southeastern Asiatic jungles and yet we felt 
the tremors of that great strife, as though the guns 


INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 183 


had been thundering there along the waters of the 
Menam. 

Little by little, I say, we are making our way into this 
conception that mankind has one common interest and 
that no part of mankind can gain without every other 
section of humanity profiting by that gain, nor any 
section of mankind suffer without all of us sharing in 
that suffering. And, of course, St. Paul’s idea carries 
the conception much further than this solidarity of 
economic interest. He is conceiving of mankind as one 
great organic body embracing the whole human race, 
as an organism of which Jesus Christ is the head, with 
many members, all related integrally, one to another, 
all fulfilling their several parts and the whole body 
dependent upon the health and the freedom of each 
Separate part and of its faithful activity and the subor- 
dination of the whole to its one rational and coordinat- 
ing heart. We have the idea worked out in part in one 
of the greatest books of our generation, Mr. Thomas 
Hardy’s The Dynasts. As Hardy sees Europe as one 
great organism, so the whole of human life is to be seen 
as one great biological unity, through which one com- 
mon life is beating, governed by one common principle, 
animated or to be animated by one common dominant 
spirit. 

St. Paul, I say, in reply to our Japanese student’s 
question in McEwen Hall to Mr. Balfour, lays down for 
us the principle of human unity, which is Jesus Christ, 
and by the same token he lays down the method and the 
power of it. A Japanese friend, who was for some time 
in the Yokohama Specie Bank in New York—he hap- 
pens to be a Japanese nobleman whom one cannot 
annoy more readily than by applying his titles to him— 


184 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


wrote me of his experience in New York one Sunday 
when he had gone into the Broadway Tabernacle church 
to hear Dr. Jefferson preach. He said that when he 
went in, this whole problem of international relations 
was still a mystery to him, but when he came out it was 
as clear as the light of noonday. He realized in view of 
what he heard that morning that there is a solution to 
this problem and a perfectly clear and simple solution. 
It is simply that all the nations should submit them- 
selves to the lordship of Jesus Christ. He said that he 
realized now that the problem of international relation- 
ships is not an insoluble one, but that we can achieve 
a human unity if we can unite every nation by itself 
first of all with Christ. . 

I remember years ago in the old town hall in Paisley, 
on the west coast of Scotland, hearing the late Dr. A. B. 
Wann put the principle in much the same way as my 
Japanese friend put it, saying that it was a mathemati- 
cal axiom that if people will move toward one common 
point, they must move toward one another, and if they 
reach that common point, they will have reached a com- 
mon association and fellowship, and that if all the 
nations of the world will press in toward the one great 
centre of the life of humanity, it must follow of neces- 
sity that all these peoples of the world will find them- 
selves in a common company round about their one 
head and Lord. 

So I might begin and end just here in our considera- 
tion of this question of Christianity and international 
relationships. The head of every man, that is the head 
of humanity, is Christ. And all that is necessary is just 
that humanity should recognize the realities, that it 
should adjust itself to the ultimate spiritual fact, that 


INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 185 


we should accept Jesus Christ, who is our head, and in 
the recognition of what we are, that is one great body 
to be governed by His spirit and mind, we should find 
the solution of all this chaotic discord of our day. 

But this would be going quite too fast, and I presume 
we should go back over our ground a bit and try to 
analyze our problem more particularly. I should like to 
lay down what I have to say in four very simple state- 
ments. 

The first is that a just and secure international order 
requires as essential to it some basis of agreement, and 
Christianity alone can adequately supply that basis. 
One of the strongest arguments against the League of 
Nations to-day is that the basis of moral concord under- 
lying all the heterogeneous elements that enter into that 
association is not adequate. Many of those who have 
antagonized the League honestly I think have done so 
on this ground. They are convinced that the nation 
cannot unite except on some firmer and broader basis 
of common moral and intellectual concord. 

Of course, that was just the difficulty which our 
American nation confronted at the beginning. I have 
been back to my old home in central Pennsylvania, 
where five generations of our family lie buried, run- 
ning back to the Scotch-Irish Puritans long before 
the days of the Revolutionary War. The first of the 
long line was the first burgess of the town, Benjamin 
Hlliott. He was sent by his constituents to the conven- 
tion at Philadelphia, which was to determine whether 
Pennsylvania would accept the Constitution designed 
to establish the American nation. His constituents were 
opposed to Pennsylvania’s accepting the proposed Con- 
stitution. ‘‘What,’’ they argued, ‘‘ally ourselves with 


186 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


Rhode Island! We have nothing ethically in common 
with that petty and repudiating State and we are re- 
solved not to bind ourselves, our great commonwealth 
to other sections of totally different character and 
ideas.’? And when he came back from the convention, 
having voted that Pennsylvania should join with Rhode 
Island and the rest of the colonies in setting up the 
American nation, he was roughly handled by his consti- 
tuents, who did not believe that there was an adequate 
basis of common moral agreement on which to launch 
this venture of the united American nation. Now it has 
turned out that there was an adequate basis of moral 
and intellectual concord. For my part, I believe that 
we have also an adequate basis among the nations of 
the world to justify the establishment of the League of 
Nations, that there is enough there of longing, of 
desire, of discontent, of revolt against the old order, 
enough there of positive purpose and view to furnish a 
basis of agreement on which to begin. But there is a 
measure of truth with those who still object. There will 
not be enough basis of agreement to last very long 
unless that foundation is to become broader. 

There is an interesting passage in one of Sir Alfred 
Lyall’s volumes, entitled Asiatic Studies, in which, sur- 
veying the history of the Asiatic states, he tries to 
determine what the function of religion has been in 
holding together a society of very diverse and hetero- 
geneous elements, and his conclusion is that ‘‘religion 
and intermarriage are the bonds that amalgamate or 
isolate sound groups’’ and that ‘‘religion has often 
shown itself more effective as a bond of union, than 
territorial patriotism.’’ We know very well that it was 
only because Christianity at last supplied common reli- 


a 


INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 187 


gious sentiments and convictions to the vast, disinte- 
grating Roman Empire that that empire was held 
together for still longer generations. Let me cite the 
fact in a paragraph from Professor Ramsay’s Pauline 
and Other Studies. 


In the minds of the ancients, no union of men, small or great, 
good or bad, humble or honorable, was conceivable without a 
religious bond to hold it together. The Roman Empire if it was 
to become an organic unity, must derive its vitality and its 
hold on men’s minds, from some religious bond. Patriotism to 
the ancients was adherence to a common religion, just as the 
family tie was not common blood but communion in the family 
religion. Accordingly, when Augustus essayed the great task 
of consolidating the loosely aggregated parts of the vast 
Empire, he had to find a religion to consecrate the unity by a 
common idea and sentiment. The existing religions were all 
national, while the Empire was striving to extirpate the 
national divisions and create a supra-national unity. A new 
religion was needed. Partly with conscious intention, partly 
borne on the tide of events, the young Empire created the 
imperial religion, the worship of an idea,—the cult of the 
majesty of Rome as represented by the incarnate deity present 
on earth in the person of the reigning Emperor and by the 
dead gods, his deified predecessors on the throne. [Just exactly 
this Japan has tried to do in our generation. | 

Except for the slavish adulation of the living Emperor, the 
idea was not devoid of nobility, but it was incapable of life be- 
cause it degraded human nature and was founded upon a lie. 
But Paul gave the Empire a more serviceable idea. He made 
possible that unity at which the imperial policy was aiming. 
The true path of development for the Empire lay in allowing 
free play to the idea which Paul offered and strengthening 
itself through this unifying religion. That principle of perfect 
religious freedom, which we regard as Seneca’s, directed for a 


188 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


time the imperial policy and caused the acquittal of Paul on 
his first trial in Rome. But freedom was soon exchanged for 
the policy of fire and sword. The imperial gods would not 
give place to a more real religion and fought for two and a 
half centuries to maintain their sham worship against it. 
When at last the idea of Paul was even reluctantly and im- 
perfectly accepted by the emperors, no longer claiming to be 
gods, it gave new life to the rapidly perishing organization of 
the empire and conquered the triumphant barbarian enemy. 
If it had not been for Paul, if one may guess at what might 
have been, no man would now remember the Roman and Greek 
civilization. Barbarism proved too powerful for the Graeco- 
Roman civilization unaided by the new religious bond, and 
every channel through which that civilization was preserved or 
interest in it maintained, either is now or has been in some 
essential part of its course Christian after the Pauline form. 


I believe that exactly what Christianity did for the 
Roman Empire in unifying its discord and giving it a 
basis on which its life could be prolonged, Christianity 
has to do for the nations to-day, and we shall never 
solve our international problems until we have pro- 
vided human life with those religious conceptions by 
which alone mankind can be united against all that 
rends humanity asunder. 

We should also remind ourselves that a just and 
secure international order is itself an idea which can 
only be kept alive by and upon other ideas adequate to 
sustain it and that only Christianity embodies and can 
supply those great ideas. I mean such ideas as, first, 
the idea of one God and one law. We are never going to 
bind together mankind in one just and secure interna- 
tional order if east and west of Suez there are different 
decalogues, if the same law does not run all the world 


INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 189 


around. We can never set up a unified humanity on any 
basis of polytheism or polynomism. There must be one 
head over all the great body and one great law laid 
down for all its life. 

J mean, in the second place, such an idea as the moral 
and biological unity of humanity and the nonexistence 
of racial superiorities, except as conceived as superiori- 
ties of capacity to serve the whole. We cannot set up a 
satisfying and enduring international order save as we 
rest on the principle that God has actually made of one 
blood all the nations of men, and that what we are 
accustomed to speak of as racial superiorities are dis- 
criminations springing subjectively out of the prefer- 
ences of the race that is doing the judging. As a matter 
of fact we ought to have a sense of proportion and per- 
spective enough to realize as an historic fact and as a 
sociological fact to-day that every race thinks itself to 
be superior to other races. 

I came the other day on an old book, Jedediah 
Morse’s American Universal Geography, published in 
Boston in the year 1796, and I found in it this footnote. 
It was the story of an interview between an Indian 
chief and Colonel Morgan in 1766 at a great salt lick 
in Ohio. The old chief was a man of eighty-four, leading 
a band of Iroquois and Wyandotte Indians, and this 
was the tale he told Colonel Morgan: 


After the Great Spirit formed the world, He made the vari- 
ous birds and beasts which now inhabit it. He also made man 
but having formed him white and very imperfect and ill- 
tempered, he placed him on one side of the world, which he 
now inhabits, from which he has lately found a passage across 
the water to be a plague to us. As the Great Spirit was not - 
pleased with this, His first work, he took black clay and made 


190 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


what you call a negro, with woolly hair. This black man was 
much better than the white man but still he did not answer 
the wish of the Great Spirit; that is, he was imperfect. At last 
the Great Spirit, having procured a piece of pure red clay, 
formed from it the red man perfectly to his own mind, and 
He was so well pleased with him that He placed him on this 
ereat island separate from the white and black men, and gave 
him rules for his conduct, promising happiness in proportion 
as that should be deserved. 


Now, that is the ingenious, instinctive judgment of 
each race upon the other. A friend of mine was travel- 
ing in the interior of China. He had lived there many 
years and was dressed as a Chinese and spoke the 
language as the people around him spoke it. He passed 
through a little town where there was a Christian 
church. As he went by the church and looked in, there 
was service going on and he stopped near the door to 
listen to what the Chinese preacher might be saying. 
He was setting forth his ideas of ethnology and explain- 
ing to his hearers that there were many different kinds 
and colors of people in the world. He said: ‘‘ First of 
all, there are the white people, then there are the black 
people, then there are the red people, then there are the 
brown people, and then there are we Chinese, the skin 
colored people.”’ 

Every race thinks it is skin-colored and that the 
others are the tinted races of the world. We are never 
going to build a human order on such ideas. We have 
to realize that there is no inherently superior race. No 
doubt the so-called white race has many advantages 
and holds in trust much for other races which it is to 
share with them but every race has its qualities of 
superiority and I suppose that, if literally we were to 


INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 19] 


judge races by the moral standards of the gospels, the 
negro race has more of those ethical, temperamental 
qualities which our Lord Jesus Christ exalted than any 
other race in the world. The superiority of which we 
feel conscious in the races is meaningless unless inter- 
preted in terms of trusteeship for a united humanity. 

In the third place, there is the idea of religious lib- 
erty, of the perfect freedom of the human spirit, with- 
out which we can never build a secure and just inter- 
national order. We cannot build a united human order 
on any limitations of the freedom of the human spirit. 
We have to build it on the largest conceivable liberty 
and only Christianity has the conception of that type of 
liberty. 

The kind of human order in which Christianity 
teaches us to believe requires a basis of universal 
human good will as well as common ideas. We are con- 
fronting to-day a very interesting new interpretation 
that bids fair to push off the ground the old conception 
of economic determinism, which had so much to do with 
landing us in this Hell that we are trying to get out of 
now in the world. We are replacing these old notions 
of economic necessitarianism with new ideas of climatic 
determinism. In his book, The Conflict of Colour, Mr. 
Putnam Weale sets forth the thesis that religious ideas, 
social conceptions, and political institutions are a 
matter of longitude and latitude, that they are deter- 
mined by the climatic conditions which surround the 
people possessing these different ideas and institutions, 
that you cannot transport them from one climate to 
another. The theory of one common body of moral 
conceptions, of one common universal religion, he holds 
to be forbidden by the climatic diversities of the world. 


192 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


Over against any such conclusions we just set our own 
human instinct of the unity of mankind, our conscious 
experience of brotherhood with men of every race, of 
every color, of every climate, of every section of the 
world. We have had enough of this experience of com- 
municable religion, of interracial identity of spirit, of 
Christian understanding and acceptability to justify 
our conviction in this regard. 

Let me cite three bits of testimony. The first one is 
from Mr. Fukuzawa, the most powerful nonofficial per- 
son in his day in Japan, the founder of the newspaper 
in Japan historically most nearly filling the position 
of the London Times, a man who has left his imprint 
deeply upon the educational, the intellectual, and the 
moral life of his land. 


There can be no doubt that many serious troubles would 
have occurred had not the Christian missionary not only shown 
to the Japanese the altruistic side of the occidental character, 
but also by his teaching and by his preaching imparted a new 
and attractive aspect to the intercourse, which otherwise would 
have been masterful and repellent. The Japanese cannot thank 
the missionary too much for the admirable leaven which he 
introduced into their relations with foreigners. . . . I once 
said that if no missionaries had ever come to our country, the 
dissoluteness and wantonness of foreigners would have come 
to be much greater and our relations to foreigners would not 
be what they are now. 


Let me take another testimony from a far other land, 
from Sir William Wadsworth Young, coming back 
from his lieutenant-governorship of the Punjab in 
India and reporting to a great gathering of business 
men in St. Michael’s in Cornhill in London. 


INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 193 


As a business man speaking to business men, I am prepared 
to say that the work which has been done by missionary agency 
in India exceeds in importance all that has been done—and 
much has been done—by the British Government in India 
since its commencement. Let me take the province which I 
know best. I ask myself, what has been the most potent influ- 
ence which has been working among the people since annexa- 
tion fifty-four years ago? And to that question I feel there is 
but one answer, Christianity as set forth in the lives and 
teaching of Christian missionaries. I do not underestimate the 
forces which have been brought to bear on the races in the 
Punjab by our beneficent rule, by British justice and enlight- 
ment, but I am convinced that the effect on native character 
produced by the self-denying labors of missionaries is vastly 
greater. The Punjab bears on its historic roll the names of 
many Christian statesmen, men who have honored God by 
their lives and endeared themselves to the people by their 
faithful work. But I venture to say, if they could speak to us 
from the Great Unseen, there is not one of them who would not 
say that the work done by men like French and Clark and 
Newton and Forman, who went in and out among the people 
for a whole generation or more, who preached by their lives 
‘the nobility of self-sacrifice, and the love of God and man is a 
higher and nobler work, and more far-reaching in its conse- 
quences. 


T offer one more testimony from a still different land, 
a long petition. signed by Persian seals and Persian 
names from all the leading men of Kumanshah in 
southwestern Kurdish Persia, beginning with the Iman 
Jumeh, that is, the chief Mohammedan ecclesiastic of 
the city, followed by all the other leading Mohamme- 
dan ecclesiastics, the leading merchants and business 
men and bankers of the city. It is addressed to the Pres- 
byterian Board of Foreign Missions, and it is an appeal 


194 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


that they will not take a certain medical missionary, 
Dr. Packard, away from that purely Mohammedan and 
Kurdish city because he and the new things he has 
brought are indispensable to the city. 

I could multiply the evidence from all over the world. 
There are no climatic divisions that split mankind into 
irrevocable and incommunicable diversities that can 
never be unified. Human love leaps all boundaries. 
There is a fellowship that is of all mankind. We shall 
set up no satisfying international order unless we build 
it on foundations of universal human good will, and 
these only Christ can produce. 

Last of all, the only kind of an international order 
that will endure, that will stand the strain which will 
surely come upon it, must be an order founded upon 
righteousness. No idea or institution that is not based 
on truth, and pervaded with truth, can enduringly pre- 
vail. And the kind of an order to whose realization we 
are working our way—so slowly—is an order that must 
rest on righteousness. Until we build the life of the 
world, all our international and interracial relation- 
ships, on the same foundation on which alone we can 
build our lives, we shall have no order of mankind, 
healing the discords, bridging the gulfs, relating men in 
one orderly universal human society. 

I know how far away we are from this, but we are 
making progress across the years. Consider the prin- 
ciples that built up the British Empire in India and 
then compare them and the attitude of the conquering 
nation and of all the other nations of the world toward | 
that process, with the principles on which the Congo 
Free State was founded, and mark the long progress in 
the interval. Then take the mandates under which the 


INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS 195 


German colonies are held now under the League of 
Nations by the different trustee nations to whom they 
are confided and compare the terms of those mandates 
with the principles on which the Congo Free State was 
built up. No one who will do this can deny that we have 
come a long, long way across the last hundred years 
toward bringing home to the consciousness of the world 
the sanctions of Christian duty and obligation and rela- 
tionship. 

But it may be that some will say: ‘‘Yes, but the task 
is too big for the forces on which you propose to lay it. 
Christianity has done about as much as anything has 
done, perhaps as much as could be hoped for, but the 
weight of the moral inertia of humanity, the deepest, 
inherent traditions that we brought up with us out of 
the jungle and that we cannot shake ourselves free 
from, the wolf nature in us that is as powerful and 
ravenous to-day as it ever was,—all these make a 
burden too.heavy for Christianity even to bear.’’ No, 
they do not. When one thinks of what has been achieved 
by a few scattered individuals operating in the spirit 
of Christ and toward His great goals, one does not 
despair of the absolute transformation of the world, if 
once for all the forces of humanity are laid open to the 
uses of Christ. 
_. I can think back over this whole missionary genera- 

tion, to the beginning of the Student Volunteer Move- 
ment, when it chose its bold motto, ‘‘The Hvangeliza- 
tion of the World in This Generation.’’ That genera- 
tion has come to an end and the world has not been 
evangelized—but it might have been. It was not the 
fault of the ideal, it was only that the number of men 
and women, ready to forget everything else and lend 


196 CHRISTIANITY AND MODERN THOUGHT 


themselves to the one supreme task for which Christ ’ 
died, were not enough to enable God to reach the whole, 
big, moving mass of human life and cleanse it and lift 
it to the order that is His will for man. But some day 
it will come, because the head of every man—that is, 
the head of humanity—is Christ. 


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